Improving Data Separation and Management for Users and Citizens

Status: Implemented

Glossary

• User - An user account that can log into FiveNet.
• Citizen - A roleplay character that is optionally linked to an user account (e.g., might be "unlinked" if an user doesn't create a FiveNet account).

Problems

• Some servers that might have expanded the ESX framework or are even using a different framework, might have different ways to assign one or more groups to an user. This is currently not really supported.
  • In case of ESX an user can only have one group assigned via the users table group column. This also binds the permissions to the char itself and not to the whole "account."
• This continues for some other (common) data, e.g., jobs, phone numbers.
  • Some chars might have more than one job, e.g., ModernV, people can have what you can call a "primary" job and a "secondary" job (technically even more), that are simply set in the users .
  • Multiple phone numbers are also not supported, as ESX only supports one phone number per char which the current fivenet_user table is based on. There seems to be some phone plugins that allow multiple phone numbers.
• Sidenote: Being able to give an user superuser access or even allowing permissions to be given to users of a job and/or "globally."

Goals

• Citizens - Info/Data Changes
  • Multiple Groups - Allowing multiple groups to be assigned to a citizen via DBSync from gameserver db and/or admin UI.
  • Multiple Jobs - Allow multiple jobs to be assigned to a citizen via DBSync from gameserver db and/or admin UI.
    • A clear distinction between primary and secondary jobs is needed.
  • Multiple Phone Numbers - Allow multiple phone numbers to be assigned to a citizen.
    • A clear distinction between primary and secondary phone numbers is needed.
• Creating/Editing/Deleting Citizens
  • Creating a citizen with incomplete or all information should be possible manually via the admin UI
    • Could be made accessible via permissions in the future for, e.g., hardcore roleplay servers that have staff manually "adding" new users via an airport.
    • Ability to set citizen information based on permission levels.
  • Ability to edit "citizens" in the FiveNet database (preferably with a way to reset back to "original" (from gameserver) state).
  • Ability to delete "citizens" from the FiveNet database (without "deleting" them from the gameserver database).
• Improve performance of account to citizens lookup by not having to use WHERE identifier LIKE '%_IDENTIFIER_HERE_' queries.
  • An user entry will be linked to the account ID directly instead of having to search for it via the identifier pattern matching.

Solutions

• Changing the fivenet_user table structure.
  • Adding a deleted_at column to be able to soft-delete users, with a deleted_reason field.
  • The current "singular" columns (group, job, and phone_number) will be kept as they are, a prefix of active_ or primary_ might be added to clarify their purpose.
  • Adding new (plural named) columns for groups, jobs, and phone_numbers that are of type JSON or LONGTEXT (required for compatibility with MariaDB).
    • Or even seperate tables for each of them, e.g., fivenet_user_groups, fivenet_user_jobs, fivenet_user_phone_numbers.
      • These tables would have a foreign key to the fivenet_user table and store multiple entries per user.
• Updating the FiveNet admin UI to support the new functionalities.
  • Adding interfaces for managing multiple groups, jobs, and phone numbers.
  • Adding interfaces for creating, editing, and deleting "citizens."