Get Spring Security intercept urls from database or properties

Question

Hopefully this is super simple, exists, and I'm overlooking something right under my nose. I know that I can restrict access via annotations:

@Secured({"ROLE_ADMIN"})

or via config:

<security:intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN, ROLE_SUPER_USER" />

I would prefer to obtain authentication rules from a database, something like:

<security:intercept-url provider="authProvider"/>

<bean id="authProvider" class="AuthProviderImpl">
    <property name="userDetailsService" ref="userDetailsService"/>
</bean>

Worst case scenario, there has to be a way to populate via a properties file right?...

/admin/**=ROLE_ADMIN
/**=ROLE_USER

<security:intercept-url props="classpath:urls.properties"/>

etc.

Please tell me this exists or my brain will explode!!! The Grails spring-security plugin ships with this out of the box so I know this has to exist. Please don't let my brain explode!!!

EDIT:

Figured it out...

You have to provide a custom org.springframework.security.intercept.web.FilterSecurityInterceptor and provide the objectDefinitionSource:

<bean id="filterSecurityInterceptor" class="org.springframework.security.intercept.web.FilterSecurityInterceptor">
    <security:custom-filter before="FILTER_SECURITY_INTERCEPTOR" />
    <property name="authenticationManager" ref="authenticationManager" />
    <property name="accessDecisionManager" ref="accessDecisionManager" />
    <property name="objectDefinitionSource">
        <value>
            CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON
            PATTERN_TYPE_APACHE_ANT
            /**login.html=IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY
            /user/**=ROLE_ADMIN
        </value>
    </property>
</bean>

And I think I'm going to use a FactoryBean:

public class RequestMappingFactoryBean implements FactoryBean {

    private final static String EOL = System.getProperty("line.separator");

    public Object getObject() throws Exception {
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        sb.append("CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON");
        sb.append(EOL);
        sb.append("PATTERN_TYPE_APACHE_ANT");
        sb.append(EOL);
        sb.append("/**login.html=IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY");
        sb.append(EOL);
        sb.append("/user/**=ROLE_ADMIN");
        return sb.toString();
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public Class getObjectType() {
        return String.class;
    }

    public boolean isSingleton() {
        return true;
    }

}

Pass it a DAO, etc.

<bean id="filterSecurityInterceptor" class="org.springframework.security.intercept.web.FilterSecurityInterceptor">
    <security:custom-filter before="FILTER_SECURITY_INTERCEPTOR" />
    <property name="authenticationManager" ref="authenticationManager" />
    <property name="accessDecisionManager" ref="accessDecisionManager" />
    <property name="objectDefinitionSource" ref="requestMappings" />
</bean>

<bean id="requestMappings" class="RequestMappingFactoryBean" />

Answer 1

It's been a while, but you can create a Voter object which helps decide whether to allow access to a URL. The Voter object can load data from the database, or a file, or just randomly return Allow, Deny, or Abstain.

Answer 2

do you want to use something like this in you spring xml?

<!-- Settings -->
<b:bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <b:property name="locations">
        <b:value>/WEB-INF/config.properties</b:value>
    </b:property>
</b:bean>

and then als in your Spring XML:

<http entry-point-ref="authenticationProcessingFilterEntryPoint">
        <intercept-url pattern='/custom/**' access="${roles.admin}"/>
</http>