It has happened to a lot of people, especially with the online banking applications – you try logging in a couple of times and get your password wrong. Then the screen changes saying the account is locked out and you need to try again in XX minutes.

Your application can use the Backendless API to access data, run searches, and store, update and delete objects in the database. When users authenticate themselves with the backend, all subsequent API calls are executed on the behalf of the logged-in user.

In a Backendless backend, you can restrict access to API operations and/or application data. A restriction may apply either to specific users or to roles. When a restriction applies to a role, it automatically applies to the users in that role.

In another post, we described how to restrict access to all data for “guest” users. The Backendless security model lets you control access to data tables, or more generally “asset containers”, at the role and operation levels. That means an application developer can set up security restrictions for API operations on a specific data table…

A user on StackOverflow asked how to load only the data that belongs to the currently logged-in user. This is indeed an interesting and very common use-case. Backendless handles it beautifully and this feature certainly deserves a place among our Recipes.

Every data object saved in Backendless has its own access control list (ACL). An object’s ACL includes permissions for users and roles for all data service operations. Using ACL, an application may be configured to allow users (and/or roles they belong to) to execute Data Service API calls.