How to Grant Permissions to Subtree in Adobe AEM

Basically, an administrator takes advantage of Adobe AEM user manager tool to grant privileges, and using this tool he can arrange well all main security policies needed, but there is some scenario that requires an advanced configuration and must be done in a different way.

For example, if you need to grant permission to view and edit pages only under a specific subpage tree of the repository, apparently it could be an easy task to do but it would eventually reveals hard to arrange.

Let’s try to schematically represent a repository structure to analyze:

→ content
    → projectA
        → en
            → SubHome1
            → Subhome2
                → Article1
                → Article2
                → Article3
        → it
    → projectB
    → projectC

Our goal is to provide a full access to SubHome2 page and all its children, not allowing to see other pages (i.e. SubHome1, it language, etc..).
It would have been easy to grant a jcr:all privilege to SubHome2 but Adobe AEM tools are based on path browsing, consequently, all folders composing the requested path must be visible to get access.
In the bullet list above in fact, we can distinguish:

• Green: Pages with full access
• Orange: Pages with a partial read access (basically only the cq:Page and cq:PageContent nodes)
• Gray: Pages not visible

To apply a security configuration like this we have to use the CRX tool (under Access Control tab) and configure for each folder the policies listed below, leveraging the restriction management provided by Jackrabbit OAK (Documentation).

PATH	PRIVILEGES	RESTRICTION	NOTE
/	ALLOW jcr:read	rep:glob=	Read permission to root node only
/content	ALLOW jcr:read	rep:glob=	Read permission to content node only
/content	rep:readProperties		Read permission to node properties (needed for CRX navigation)
/content	ALLOW jcr:read	rep:glob=/*/jcr:content	Read permission to see jcr:content node (for page properties)
/content/projectA	ALLOW jcr:read	rep:glob=	Read permission to projectA node only
/content/projectA/en	ALLOW jcr:read	rep:glob=	Read permission to EN node only
/content/projectA/en/SubHome2	ALLOW jcr:all		Full access to node section

View table on plain text formatHint: To set an empty rep:glob value fill the input field with two double quotes (“”)

Once done final user will be able to use all standard AEM tools and properly manage his area, preserving resources outside of his focus range

Source: https://aemcorner.com/how-to-grant-permissions-to-subtree-in-adobe-aem/