Efficient evaluation of shared predicates for XForms page access control

Access control on form-based Web information systems has become one of the useful methods for implementing client systems in a service-oriented architecture. In particular, XForms language is being adopted in many systems as a description language for XML-based user interfaces and server interactions. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for the evaluation of XPath-based access rules for XForms pages. In this model, an XForms page is a sequence of queries and the client system performs user interface realization along with XPath rule evaluations. XPath rules have instance-dependent predicates, which for the most part are shared between rules. For the efficient evaluation of shared predicate expressions in access control rules, we proposed a predicate graph model that reuses the previously evaluated results for the same context node. This approach guarantees that each predicate expression is evaluated for the relevant XML node only once. We present our approach and current implementation status.