Patent ID: 7856448

Claim:
An access control method comprising: enabling, by a computing system for a requestor, access to said computing system, wherein said computing system comprises a memory system, wherein said memory system comprises group based access control data and computing resource data, wherein said group based access control data and said computing resource data are organized based on an extensible markup language (XML) schema, wherein said XML schema comprises a recursive format used to support a plurality of branch levels in a resource tree, wherein said XML schema defines nodes defining element types labeled as ResourceTree, ResourceTreeGroup, ResourceTreeItemT, and ResourceTreeItem, and wherein said computing resource data comprises object identifiers associated with said computing resource data; associating, by said computing system in response to said enabling, first group data of said group based access control data with said requestor, wherein said first group data comprises a specified group to which said requestor belongs; receiving, by said computing system from said requestor, a first request for accessing said computing resource data, wherein said first request for accessing said computing resource data comprises a request for retrieving a list of application resource items; associating, by said computing system in response to said first request, said first group data with a first group of computing resources of said computing resource data; generating, by said computing system, a first list comprising attribute values for said first group of computing resources, wherein said attribute values are associated with an XML string that conforms to said XML schema; determining, by said computing system, an access control decision associated with said first request and specified by an object identifier of said object identifiers, said group based access control data, and said requestor; applying, by said computing system, said access control decision to said first list, wherein said access control decision indicates whether the requested resource data is allowed to be accessed by said requestor; and presenting, by said computing system to said requestor, said first access control decision.