Is there a way to grant a user access to only all non system views of database?

Question

In SQL Server, I have a user in a particular database and I've been asked to grant them access to all of the non-system views of the database only. I believe this can be done by editing securables of type view and granting select on each one, but there are many, many views. Is there a more efficient way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

There is no syntax such as

GRANT SELECT ON ALL::Views TO SomeUser 

You can GRANT SELECT permissions on individual objects, schemas or the entire database but not filtered by object type to only include Views. For this sort of adhoc task I'd probably create a new role called ViewReader, add the user to that role then in SSMS run

SELECT 'GRANT SELECT ON ' + 
          QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id)) + '.' + QUOTENAME(name) + 
      ' TO ViewReader;'
FROM sys.views
WHERE is_ms_shipped = 0

to generate a script to run to GRANT the required permissions.

Answer 2

I took another approach in my case. This is what I did:

1. Create a login and map it to a database.
2. Go to a database an create a schema called Public_View for example. The owner of this schema must be the same owner of the tables that the views are gonna refer.
3. Grant the new user access to the new schema.
4. Create as many views as you want in the new schema and the new user will have access to them.

The good thing is that the new user will not have access to the tables, he won't even be able to see the tables.

I hope it helps.