Is it possible to grant security roles through an event receiver?

Question

I have a requirement to grant a department contribute to their department parent & child sites. The catch is, they also want to be able to grant & remove contribute to outside department users. If I were to create a field called "Contribute Members" to a list on a site, could I have an event receiver grant/remove AD users contribute when the form is saved?

Answer 1

Of course, you could.

Some key articles for you to start with:

1. SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivilegies - this will allow you to elevate privilegies for current user
2. SPFieldUserValue and SPFieldUserValueCollection - these classes will help you to extract values from "Person or group" column.
3. SPWeb.EnsureUser method - will help you to ensure that AD user is added to a site
4. SPGroup.AddUser method - will allow you to add users to SharePoint groups of a site, providing appropriate privilegies to them

Feel free to ask, if you need more details for any step.

Answer 2

That is one of the common uses of Event Receivers : to take actions the users themselves might not be able to do due to UI or security restrictions.