The Elephant User API

Service designed to manage user-centric data within the Elephant ecosystem. It handles communication channels like inbox messages and system notifications, as well as persistent user configurations through structured settings and simple properties.

Features

• Inbox Messages: Store and retrieve user-specific documents intended for an inbox.
• System Messages: A secondary channel for system-level notifications and events.
• Settings Management:
  • Documents: Structured configurations validated against schemas using the revisor lib.
  • Properties: Lightweight key-value pairs for simple user preferences.
  • Event Log: A unified log of changes to documents and properties, supporting long-polling for efficient client synchronization.

Shared Access Control

The service implements a multi-tier access model based on JWT claims for documents:

• Private: Documents and properties owned by the user (sub claim).
• Shared: Documents can be owned by an Organization (org claim) or a Unit (units claim), allowing shared access within those groups.
• Permissions:
  • Standard users can read and write their own data and read shared data.
  • Users with the doc_admin scope can manage shared data across their organization and units.

Schemas

Setting documents are validated against revisor constraint sets embedded in the binary from internal/schema_*.json:

• internal/schema_messages.json — constraints for inbox message payloads.
• internal/schema_settings.json — constraints for setting documents.

Adding a new setting type today requires editing schema_settings.json and rebuilding the service. The plan is to support dynamic settings schema registration through the user API so that schemas can be added at runtime without redeploying.