find pages with upper level parents that have x field value

[PHPSpert]

I have a page architecture like this:

account-data

 - 1010 (account, owner=clinton, assigned_users=brian)

   - Some update

   - Some project

      - Some task

 - 1020 (account, owner=jack, assigned_users=brian,clinton)

 - 1030 (account, owner=tom, assigned_users=clinton)

 - 1040 (account, owner=jordan, assigned_users=brian)

What I want to do is give viewing permissions (for updates, projects and tasks) to users only if they are either assigned or own the parent account.

I need to find out a clean way of doing this. For example, I could do:

foreach($pages->find("template=task") as $item) { if($item->parents()->find("template=account,user|assigned_user={$user}")) ...

But looping through all of the items is a pretty heavy task.

Sometimes it has to go a few levels before finding the parent with the user info.

Is there a better way of doing this?

[PHPSpert]

Ok, here's another idea:

let's say we're looking for "update" pages assigned to or owned by $user:

function findUserPages($user, $template) {

return $pages->find("template=account,user|assigned_user={$user}")->find("template={$template}");

}

$pages_found = findUserPages($user, "update");

[ryan]

I'm confused because not sure if your definition of 'user' here is a ProcessWire User, or you are maintaining your own system of users? To me it looks like you are maintaining your own user system, but not sure? This would affect the answer. I think we also need a little more context about where this code is going. Is this simply to check access on a page being viewed, or is this compiling/aggregating all access information to display somewhere? I'm guessing this is to aggregate somewhere since you mentioned looping through all the items? One thing that might be worth looking at is the PageEditPerUser module, which I think does some of what you are trying to accomplish here.