org.springframework.security
Interface GrantedAuthority

All Superinterfaces:

Comparable, Serializable

All Known Implementing Classes:

GrantedAuthorityImpl, JaasGrantedAuthority, SwitchUserGrantedAuthority

public interface GrantedAuthority
extends Serializable, Comparable

Represents an authority granted to an Authentication object.

A GrantedAuthority must either represent itself as a String or be specifically supported by an AccessDecisionManager.

Implementations must implement Comparable in order to ensure that array sorting logic guaranteed by UserDetails.getAuthorities() can be reliably implemented.

Version:

$Id$

Author:

Ben Alex

Method Summary

String

getAuthority() If the GrantedAuthority can be represented as a String and that String is sufficient in precision to be relied upon for an access control decision by an AccessDecisionManager (or delegate), this method should return such a String.

Methods inherited from interface java.lang.Comparable

compareTo

Method Detail

getAuthority

String getAuthority()

If the GrantedAuthority can be represented as a String and that String is sufficient in precision to be relied upon for an access control decision by an AccessDecisionManager (or delegate), this method should return such a String.

If the GrantedAuthority cannot be expressed with sufficient precision as a String, null should be returned. Returning null will require an AccessDecisionManager (or delegate) to specifically support the GrantedAuthority implementation, so returning null should be avoided unless actually required.

Returns:

a representation of the granted authority (or null if the granted authority cannot be expressed as a String with sufficient precision).