Support parsing multiple policies

[khieta]

Category

User level API changes

Describe the feature you'd like to request

It would be useful to provide an API that takes as input a string (or file) consisting of multiple policies and returns a Set<policy>. We currently only provide a constructor for a single Policy, which encourages hacky tricks like splitting an input policy file on semicolons (which will break when comments, strings, or eids contain this character).

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally the API should just reuse what's available in Rust rather than building a new parser.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

Is this something that you'd be interested in working on?

• 👋 I may be able to implement this feature request
• ⚠️ This feature might incur a breaking change

[bman654]

As far as I can tell, there isn't currently a way to just load an entire cedar policy file that has multiple policies, correct? I need to instantiate Policy objects one by one (like using your hacky trick above)?

[khieta]

Yes, I believe this is still the case. Pull requests welcome! Most of our development effort is spent on the Rust implementation (which has all the nice APIs you'd expect).

[bman654]

I was thinking about this more last night b/c I was also concerned with the cost of API calls in this wrapper - the serialization/deserialization of your policy set (slice) on each auth request. Seems like it could get prohibitive for a large policy set. Was thinking about how it would be nice if the Java objects were just proxies or handles to Rust objects.

Then realized that probably what I'm looking for is a Java binding to the cedar-local-agent. I don't know what the use case is for cedar-java but the use case I was looking for was to be able to load a Policy Set from somewhere and make authorization requests from Java, all in the same process. Seems like the API surface of cedar-local-agent is closer to what I am looking for, it just doesn't have a Java wrapper.

If I ever get some free time I'll work on that.

[mark-creamer-amazon]

Merged 165 and closing. Please reopen if anything else is needed