Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Elements of the User-Level Security Model

To establish User-Level security, the Jet database engine uses a set of elements that, taken as a whole, describe the model. The four elements that make up the model are:

• The user of your solution   This may be a real person or a process running on a computer.
  
  
• The group   A group is a collection of users who require the same level of access to a set of objects. Users can belong to more than one group.
  
  
• The SystemDB or workgroup information file   This is a Microsoft Jet database that stores the definitions of users, groups, and passwords.
  
  
• Your database   The database contains your solution's objects, along with the permissions settings for each object for each user and group.

Figure 18.1 illustrates how these elements relate.

Figure 18.1 The Microsoft Jet Security Model