US Patent No. 11416484 - Prepared by Attorney David Tran for Salesforce and filed by Dergosits & Noah LLP
Brief description: For some embodiments, the security application 260 may continue to use the user's visibility statistic associated with the materialized sharing rules 340 until there is a change in the configuration file 305. For example, the change in the configuration file 305 may occur when the sharing rule 310 is modified by its record owner. In such situation, it may be necessary for the sharing rule 310 to be re-evaluated and its associated user's visibility statistic may be updated. For some embodiments, the user's visibility statistic may need to be updated if an object or a table is updated by adding new records or removing existing records.FIG. 4 shows an example diagram that includes non-materialized sharing rules, in accordance with some embodiments. A sharing rule may be materialized or non-materialized. There may be situations where it may not be efficient for a sharing rule to be materialized. This may depend on multiple factors including, for example, the complexity and high overhead of having to generate the shared records in the shadow shared table. One example of such a sharing rule occur when a record owner shares records using a technique referred to as “sharing sets”, a feature included in Salesforce Classic product of Salesforce.com of San Francisco, Calif. A sharing set enables a record owner to grant community or portal users access to any record associated with an account or contact that matches the user's account or contact. This may cause a huge number of shared records to be generated when there are many users. As such, the non-materialized sharing rules 405 are sharing rules that may not be evaluated after they are created and therefore no shared record is generated in the shadow shared table 345. The non-materialized sharing rules 405 may be stored in the database 270.