[Zope] Authenticated Users and lots of folders

[Tony McDonald]

Hi all,
I need the Zen of the list here, before I go off and implement something
weird wild and wacky.

I have a lot of authenticated users (1200 staff, 14000 students).
The staff are associated with a department.
There are 85 departments, each with a code (eg 1550 = Medical Faculty)
I want all authenticated staff to be able to add entries to a database.
I want some staff to be able to act as 'Editors', that is, allow the
database entries to be displayed.

Thing is I *don't* want staff from dept 'a' to be able to act as editors for
dept 'b'.

We currently use UserDB to do our cookie based authentication.

My first thought was to create 85 folders, with ids '1550', '1099' etc and
install a UserDB into each one of them. Each one of the folders has a
property 'dept', that is the value of the dept code (eg 1550). I then do a
ZSQL query something like

Select username, password, roles, domains from password, dept_code from
departments where username = <dtml-sqlvar username type=string> and
dept_code = <dtml-sqlvar dept type=string>

Does this sound sensible to people?
Does anyone have a better idea! :)

(please don't say I need to use CMF - I'm tracking that list, but I can't
figure out how to extract the various parts of CMF (reviewers etc) to use in
my situation).
TIA
Tone
-- 
Dr Tony McDonald,  Assistant Director, FMCC, http://www.fmcc.org.uk/
The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 243 6140
A Zope list for UK HE/FE  http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/zope