Run as Another User

The Pronghorn class has a function called sudo that provides the ability to run a given method using the permissions of a different user. This is an asynchronous function and can only be used to call asynchronous functions.

Accessing the Pronghorn Class

An instantiation of the Pronghorn class is made by IAP on startup. It is exposed as the global pronghorn object. IAP applications and adapters may reference the pronghorn object.

Sudo Arguments

The sudo method takes three arguments:

Example Implementation

// Standard user object used for authentication
// We will become the user named test
const user = {
    "username":"test",
    "password":"test"
}

// Call to getDevice on an adapter named 'myDeviceAdapter' to get a device named 'ATL0'
// N.B. Even though getDevice expects a callback, it is left out here.
const action = {
  service : 'myDeviceAdapter',
  method : 'getDevice',
  parameters: [
    'ATL0'
  ]
}

// Call the sudo function and provide the callback here.
pronghorn.sudo(user, action, (result, err) => {
  if (err) {
    return console.error(null,err)
  }
  // print out the data returned from the call
  return console.log(result);
});

Auditing

Whenever the sudo command is used, a new session is created in addition to the one calling sudo. The executed method is run under that new session. Since there are two different sessions, there are two different audit trails. Both the session that called sudo and the sudo session itself are automatically flagged for audit serialization.