It should be a very quick and convenient way of doing it - much simpler than referring to a database everytime to check whether you've got access or not.
The most common way of fixing access permissions is to have a bunch of fields in the database, representing each screen - you just store 'Y' or 'N' in each field to set the access permission for that screen.
Instead of that approach, one can easily store the whole information in a single or multiple byte of data, using each individual bit to represent a particular screen.
In the database approach, you'd need 8 bytes (8 characters - Y/N) to store access rights for 8 screens, whereas, in the bitflag approach, you can use just a single BYTE (remember each BYTE has 8 BITS) - to store the whole data.
Take for example a byte - consisting of these bits: 10011011 - each '0' or '1' represents whether permission is disallowed or allowed ..
You just load this information from the database ONCE when the user logs in, and store this info in a session variable.. everytime u access a page, you check against this value and see whether this dude has access or not.
But one problem with this approach - what if this user just walks off from his terminal without logging out ??? And his session hasn't expired yet ? Anybody else can come in and mess around - but so can you do it in case of the first approach.. If one forgets to log out, even God can't help (with due respects)...
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