The live-pair uniqueness is a partial index (WHERE revoked_at IS NULL),
which cannot read the clock: an expired but never-revoked grant kept
occupying the slot, so re-inviting the same person after expiry always
failed as a duplicate though they had no access. Close the lapsed row at
the moment of re-invite — conditionally, the expiry state in the WHERE —
so revocation still never deletes and the fresh invitation mints its row.
The revoker is stamped GRANTOR because the paired revoked-by check
requires both columns set and the enum has no expiry member. An audit row
records the close. Proven against the real index: the guard was watched
fail with a duplicate before the fix landed.
A grant has meant one thing since it shipped: the whole record, to read or to
add to. This lays the words for the two shapes the rest of the sharing work
needs — part of a record, and management of one — while changing what no
existing grant does.
`ShareDomain` is a closed set of eight sections in `src/lib/sharing/scope.ts`,
clustered from the delegable read surfaces rather than invented, plus the
distinguished `record` for the routes that read across them. It never converts
to a `ModuleKey` and never imports one: two masks, two questions, no shared
spelling, because the day they share a name is the day somebody makes one
imply the other, and a module the owner enabled is not a section the owner
shared.
`account_grants.scope_json` is NULL on every row that exists, and NULL is the
entire record — the answer those rows were consented as, so no backfill and no
re-consent. A non-NULL value is read through one fail-closed normaliser: a
blob it cannot parse opens nothing, including a section the blob happened to
name. That is the deliberate inverse of the module preference normaliser,
which fails open on purpose; both do the safe thing with a value nobody can
read, and the safe thing differs because one answers an authorization question
and the other a presentation question.
`MANAGE` joins the level enum, ordered above WRITE so a write grant can never
satisfy it, and carries no scope at all: management of part of a record
promises a boundary that cannot survive an edit, so the invite path refuses to
write one.
`requireRecordAuth` takes the section as a second required argument. The
requirement is the lever — a delegable route without a classification does not
typecheck, so the set of classified routes cannot fall behind the set of
delegable ones. All fifty-seven modules carry theirs. The structural guard
freezes each against the production vocabulary, fails when a module's own arms
disagree, and pins a non-zero count of resolved sections so a matcher that
stopped reading the argument fails instead of agreeing with everything.
`requireGuardianAuth` is exported and reaches nothing yet. It gates on the
managed-profile marker rather than on the grant, so an adult who granted
management of their own record cannot arrive at that record's settings by any
argument about what MANAGE means: widening MANAGE would widen the record
resolver and would not touch this one. Its frozen list lands empty, with the
declaration site as the positive control that keeps "nothing reaches it" a
measurement rather than a renamed symbol.
`users.managed_profile_at` says since when a record is one somebody else runs.
A timestamp and not a boolean, for a reason the schema has to keep possible:
clearing it is the handover, and the grants and the activity trail span it
untouched.
A grant has always had an access column and `inviteGrant` has always written
READ into it. That was the right way to ship the first version: "this release
never grants write" was a property of the file rather than a promise in a
comment. Remove it deliberately now, so somebody sharing their record can offer
reading or reading plus adding.
The level is a required argument to `inviteGrant` and is defaulted in exactly
one place, the invite schema, where an omitted field becomes READ. An older
client's payload therefore stays valid and stays narrow, and the domain module
never guesses a level nobody named.
There is no upgrade path and that is the decision, not a gap. A grant is READ
or WRITE from the moment it is offered and stays that way until somebody ends
it. Widening a live one would change what the delegate agreed to without asking
them again, and their consent is half of what makes a write grant legitimate.
The way up is a new invitation, accepted again.
The audit row and the wide event carry the level: "who was given what, and by
whom" is the question that row exists to answer.
A consent record has to answer who consented and when, and the grant row
already does. It does not have to answer from where, and an address kept for
as long as both accounts exist is personal data held past the point it
evidences anything. Nothing read the column, which makes it exactly the
write-only field scripts/audit-column-readers.ts exists to surface.
The acceptance stays evidenced: audit_logs records it with the caller's
address under that table's own retention. The column never reached the wire,
so the grant view and the OpenAPI contract are unchanged.
Written before the feature shipped, so migration 0295 drops an empty column.
A revoked grant with no revoker, or a revoker with no revocation, are
both rows that cannot answer the question the table exists to answer.
The migration already enforces the pair; this asserts it against real
Postgres rather than trusting that the domain module is the only writer.
An account grant is one account's standing permission to read another
account's record. The row is also the consent record for the act that
created it: there is no second receipt table, because two records of one
act drift and then nobody can say which is true.
That shapes the table. Revocation stamps revoked_at and revoked_by
instead of deleting, so the record can still answer who had access, from
when to when, and who ended it. The uniqueness constraint is therefore
partial — one live grant per (owner, delegate), with history accumulating
underneath — otherwise a re-invitation would either be refused or would
overwrite the first grant's acceptance. Both foreign keys cascade: a
grant naming a user who no longer exists is an authorization nobody can
resolve and nobody can revoke.
The state machine lives in src/lib/sharing/grants.ts and only there. The
acting-account resolver and the grant surfaces both read these rows, and
if each carried its own idea of "active" the drift would be silent in
exactly one direction: the resolver admitting a grant the panel shows as
ended. Pending confers nothing, expiry is checked against the clock of
the request that reads the row, and every transition is a conditional
update so two concurrent accepts cannot both win.
The access column carries READ or WRITE and only READ is ever written.
It exists from day one so that delegated writes become enforcement work
rather than migration work.
Three lifecycle paths, each proven against the real route:
- Delete All Data removes grants from either side. The wipe loop asks
every model for "this account's rows", and a table relating two
accounts has no user_id to answer with, so wipe-plan.ts now declares
the owner columns and translates. Wiping only the grantor side would
leave the account still holding access to other people's records.
- Account deletion removes them in both directions.
- An admin restore leaves them exactly as it found them. Grants are
classified NOT_IN_BACKUP: rolling data back is a decision an admin
makes, but rolling an authorization back is a decision nobody makes,
and a grant revoked on Tuesday must not come back alive out of
Monday's file. After a restore, sharing is off and both people
re-consent.
The backup classification guard was reading a user relation by field
name, so a model naming its account relations grantor and grantee read
as instance-scoped and was excused from having a verdict at all. It now
reads the type. That surfaced InviteToken, classified here too.
Marc-André Bombeck