Namespaces and tags provide a powerful mechanism for organizing information. The Fluidinfo API provides a set of tools for creating, describing and using them to store information about anything and everything. Until now, you had to create them before you could use them to store values, but we’ve changed that. Namespaces and tags are now created automatically, on first use, provided you have permission to do so. A number of API calls that had to be made in the past are no longer necessary, which makes storing data easier and faster than before.
Permissions provide fine-grained privacy controls to define who has access to see and work with information in Fluidinfo. By default, Fluidinfo creates permissions that grant everyone read access to information, while limiting write access to the author of the information. This is good for the most part, as Fluidinfo and its users benefit from sharing information with each other. The default behaviour could cause surprising results when used with a namespace that had been locked down and made private though, because the new namespaces and tags would be public. This is no longer the case. Permissions for new namespaces and tags now inherit from their parent namespace, at creation time. Changing permissions for existing namespaces and tags won’t cause any changes to propagate to children.
Namespace permissions are inherited one-to-one. That is, the create namespace permission is copied to a new child namespace, the update namespace permission is copied to a new child namespace, and so on. Tags are a little bit different because they have a different set of permissions than namespaces. The update tag, delete tag, write tag value and delete tag value permissions are all inherited from the create namespace permission on the parent namespace. The read tag value permission is inherited from the list namespaces permission on the parent namespace. Control permissions are inherited from the namespace’s control permissions.
The combination of automatic namespaces and tags with inherited permissions makes Fluidinfo both easier and safer to use. We hope you enjoy these changes!