Displaying permissions

(Groberts) #1

I am looking for someone who may be able to assist as I have not found an answer in the Matrix User Manuals…


We have a news site that uses an Asset Listing page to display news items, depending on a user's permission level (it is a password protected Intranet site). So there are about 4 different permission levels, which determines which content they see…



I am looking to display the Read Permissions of the asset on the actual News Item. That way, users can clearly see who has permission to each News Item. EG. Headline: Forum User Solves Matrix Dilemna, Date: 17 Mar 2009, Access: Content Authors, System Administrators



Is there an Asset Keyword that will achieve this?? To date I have not been able to find one…



It would also be great to eventually expand the concept to list the read permissions for all pages in our Intranet site, possibly using a Global Variable in the Matrix Design File.



Any ideas???

(Mark Brydon) #2

[quote]I am looking to display the Read Permissions of the asset on the actual News Item. That way, users can clearly see who has permission to each News Item. EG. Headline: Forum User Solves Matrix Dilemna, Date: 17 Mar 2009, Access: Content Authors, System Administrators


Is there an Asset Keyword that will achieve this?? To date I have not been able to find one…[/quote]

The Permissions screen can be exposed in Simple Edit (ie; while the user is editing) by using the %permissions-% keyword in a Simple Edit Layout.



Apart from that it would theoretically be possible to obtain this information through an SQL query configured through a DB Data Source. Of course we recommend that this sort of information is displayed only to logged-in users.

(Robin Shi) #3

Try these keywords,
%asset_read_permission%

%asset_write_permission%

%asset_admin_permission%

But they don't help to list out LDAP users.

(Groberts) #4

[quote]Try these keywords,
%asset_read_permission%

%asset_write_permission%

%asset_admin_permission%

But they don't help to list out LDAP users.[/quote]



Thanks Robin - that works surprisingly well. Unfortunately we are using LDAP - but I think I can get around it by creating a new access group and linking our LDAP group underneath it. I wonder why these keywords are not widely available (or maybe they are)?

(Deborah Sherwood) #5

These keyword replacements are documented in the MySource Matrix Concepts manual.

(Groberts) #6

Thank you - I will check it out. On further investigation the keywords still don't help achieve what I want to achieve. They will basically list all the users that have permission - but not what I want to display which is the user groups. We have over 10,000 user accounts so it is fairly unhelpful listing all the users that have access to a particular asset, as it is likely to run into the thousands! Anyhow, I will keep trying to come up with some solution - there does now appear to be an easier answer.

What I am leaning towards now is placing all News Items into folders based on permission groups. I can then use Asset Keywords to display the name of the parent folder(s) - basically the same as the user groups that have permission to access. Thanks to all those that replied.
(Andrew Harris) #7

Is there an answer to this very old problem?

We have complex permissions, and thousands of users.
The %asset_admin_permission% keyword is not suitable because it lists users. We don’t assign permissions to the user, we always use groups. I’ve tried all sorts of keyword gymnastics to get a listing of the groups with permissions to an asset, but can’t get anything suitable.

The scenario we need to address is to allow a user to see (basically) the information on the Permissions screen. This is for users who don’t have permission to see that screen, we’d probably use a dynamic page to fetch the info based on an asset ID, which they can get from their Edit+ info tab.

The end result we’re hoping for, is to enable a very few users to add a user to a group, while the rest would be able to raise a helpdesk request based on the information we’ve displayed.

Is there a way?

(Peter McLeod) #8

Hi
Maybe the JS API getPermissions method?
https://matrix.squiz.net/manuals/web-services/chapters/javascript-api#getPermissions
Thanks
Peter