Is there a functional reason for the naming convention for custom actions?

Question

I'm writing a component for which I'd like to implement some additional restrictions on actions. For example, I want administrators to be able to view user details, but restrict some sensitive information to a specific group of administrators. For this special right, I've defined an additional action core.view.sensitive:

<action name="core.admin" title="..." description="..." /> 
<action name="core.view" title="..." description="..." /> 
<action name="core.view.sensitive" title="..." description="..." /> 

I'm trying to follow conventions here, but what is the purpose of the dot-notation for the action names? Is there some implicit hierarchy I'm not aware of? Do all users with the right to action core.view, automatically also get core.view.sensitive (or vice versa)? Of is it all just for aesthetics?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, it currently makes no difference in terms of code. So it is only a human readable way of indicating hierarchy. Be aware that you can't use whitespaces and hyphens in action names because these are stripped out by Access library.