The permissions system I designed at work solves the search problem, although it is not as powerful as what's described in the article. We have three main conc

The permissions system I designed at work solves the search problem, although it is not as powerful as what's described in the article. We have three main concepts in the sytem: - Capabilities (eg. "read profile") - Selectors (eg. "profiles belonging to customer X) - Groups (eg. "profile") All queries are of the form "Do I have capability X on resource Y" (where resource Y belongs to a particular group). A "permission set" is a mapping from a capability to a set of selectors. Selectors can be composed (eg. you could OR two selectors together) but are predefined. Since they are predefined, our search implementation can understand a subset of the selectors, and translate them into an ElasticSearch-compatible query. We then filter the results by evaluating the permissions normally: this catches any cases where there was no way to construct a query, or if the constructed query could not be completely precise. If this occurs, then we show a message on the page like "some profiles were hidden because you do not have permission to view them" and then we might show 19 profiles on a page instead of the full 20, so that our pagination can still work efficiently.