Given a flat file of user records, we are interested in the following fields, per user:

• Patron Group(s)

• Staff Member Permissions

• Username

• Password

• For the our purposes, we should treat both Groups and Permissions as permissions, since (in our view) a Group is merely a permission with a number of sub-permissions. Thus, we begin with the Groups and Permissions.

The first thing we need to do is make certain that they exist. We can query the Permissions module to determine this. If they do not exist, we need to tell the Permissions module to create the permissions in question.

Next, we'll create a user entry in the Permissions module, with the name corresponding to our username field, and the permissions possessed by this user corresponding to the groups and member permissions in our flatfile entry.

Finally, we'll create a user entry in the Authentication module, with username and password set for the login credentials.