Documents collaboration and security

You will need to do something within your control on the server in order to dispatch this document. You could have the messages all saved into a central database, and then use filtered replication to only replicate from the central database to a given user, those documents tagged with that user as a recipient.

Alternatively, each user could have a publicly addressable "inbox" database, which accepts POST requests but nothing else (unless you are the user). This will require a little bit of a proxy on your backend. Then you could have one user drop the message directly into the other user's cloud-based inbox, for sync to the other users device.

In the future we'll be releasing a product that encapsulates patterns like this, but it will not be available for a few months.

The best approach is probably to replicate the shared document into the target user's database. Then s/he can access it without needing access to your database. This can be done with a filtered replication set up on the server — either replicate a specific list of document IDs, or use a filter that looks at a document property like "sharewith:" or something like that.

Our upcoming Syncpoint product is being designed to handle exactly this situation, which turns out to be a common one. We don't have much to say about it yet, but we'll be releasing some design documents soon.

Thank you for the response. I have documents with mandatory field 'author', and a list of members. Only these users who are checked with userCtx.name are allowed to make changes to the document and the replication to mobile will only send their documents.

I tried to filter requests like $HOST/dbname/id using nginx as a Reverse Proxy but than replication failed.

Replication of the shared document into target user's database sounds resonable. Is there a posibility to automatically trigger replication from this public db to target user's database? Or put some local PHP client who listens on _changes and does the replication?

Thank you again!

Yes I would do this with a custom server-side changes listener written in the language of your choice.

I would like to ask one more question.
Is there a possibility to enable client authentication via SSL? I plan to give my mobile app a certificate so only users could get into the database using my mobile app. I know that this could be achieved by setting up a proxy, but is it possible to authenticate clients without a proxy?
Thank you in advance!

Syncpoint Server will definitely support this. I'm not sure whether CouchDB does, without adding a proxy. Chris might have an answer to that, or you could ask on the CouchDB 'user@' mailing list.