A User Interface Design Model To Support Access Control

Recently, visual manual interface design tools have been adopted, but this kind of design method by hand can't meet the requirements from the aspects of development efficiency, maintenance, consistency, reusable performance, platform transplant and so on. The variability and customization requirements of interface increase the difficulty of interface design development. To satisfy such requirements, the ideas of model driven, interface division and design pattern are introduced into interface development gradually. UI (User Interface) design can help designers to focus on the concept design, avoiding premature design for details. At the same time, it makes the relationship between different parts of an interface and the roles they play become clearer. UI design is one important aspect in the development of the application software systems, and access control (security management) plays a comparably important role in modern software systems. The reliability, security and stability of the access-related modules, which can be found in various operating systems and common application programs, have a direct influence on the normal operation of the software system. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to establish a highly-efficient UI model which supports access control.The traditional methods used in UI design, generally adopt the thinking of the software engineering, which start from the user's needs in a task-focused way, construct different types of declarative models to express abstract interface and UI model of different layers, and based on that, establish the editing, developing and operating environments. All of the methods have certain extent of progress. These traditional UI design methods, however, are single-role oriented in the UI modeling, without considering multi-role modeling on the same interface, nor the particularities in UI layout and presentations under multi-role access control, affecting the descriptive ability of the model negatively.Traditional methods of UI design cannot express multi-user access control, so a new model named as ACUI (Access Control User Interface) is proposed on the multi-user access control. Based on the traditional UI design models and RBAC (Role Based Access Control) model, ACUI gives a formalized analysis on the roles and use-cases in the UM. And according to the descriptions for the UI elements and their interaction relations in the IM, we give the specifications for different presentation rules and the constructions of UI layout trees of different roles in the UIM. Automatic code generation is finally realized. Experiments show that the model can provide a good guide for the generation of the multi-user access control user interface.Aimed at the disadvantages that conventional UI design models are not able to support the modeling of multi-user access control satisfactorily, this paper proposes a multi-user role access control user interface model based on the extended FMP model. The UM formally describes the relationships between the roles and the permissions (use-cases), and based on different roles, the UIM defines the UI layout and the presentation rules in accordance with the data objects defined by the DM and the interactive relationships defined by the IM, and the code which supports the access control is generated finally. The establishment of the model has raised the abstract level of the UI design and improved the descriptive capability of the model.