1 Reply by Barny

  • Barny
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Re: Assigning access controls by folder or survey

Dear all,

We are in the process of setting up a networked version of R6 which will be used by various species experts as well as other staff involved in biological recording. For the sake of ease of maintenance and export we are trying to find a way of keeping all the databases in one installation of R6.

The problem is that some of the databases are quite specialized and we would want to constrain edit rights to some of these to specialist staff. Is there a way of setting different access controls to surveys grouped in folders or individual surveys? For example we would like the invertebrates database to be editable by our invertebrate ecologists but not necessarily  by other staff.

Any advice on how to set and manage the appropriate permissions would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance

Barnaby
(CCW)

2 Reply by MikeWeideli

  • MikeWeideli
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Re: Assigning access controls by folder or survey

Dear Barnaby

Recorder will allow you to restrict a user to specified Survey, but it does so by making the Surveys invisible to those who do not have a right to access them.  What you require seems to be  to allow everyone to be able to see the records and I assume report on them, but only the selected users(s) to be able to change the Records. This isn't  supported within Recorder, however there is a way around this which may help. What you would need to do is to provide each user with two login names. One with full edit rights and with access to the Surveys they can change, and one with just view only edit rights to all Surveys. In this situation when a user just wished to view records they could log on with their restricted login and been able to view all data, but change nothing. When they wishes to edit or add to the Surveys they would need to login with their Full Edit login and then they would be able to see and change just the Survey where they had edit rights.

This would mean setting up the user twice in the Individual table. One name could be their actual name , and one  a dummy name for login for view only. For data entry purposes only their proper name would be used  and never the dummy name.

For example if we set up two Individuals  Mike Smith  and VOMikeSmith (View Only)  then VOMikeSmith can be given access to all data, but with read only permission. Mike Smith  can be given Full Edit rights, but restricted to selected Surveys.

You could also restrict the view only users to specific surveys, for example a Survey currently in Work in Progress could be restricted so that it can only be viewed by certain users. 

Only a user with Admin rights would be able to change  the way this is set up.

Mike

Mike Weideli

MikeWeideli's Website

3 Reply by Barny

  • Barny
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Re: Assigning access controls by folder or survey

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the quick reply. Your suggestion sounds like a good work around however would it be possible to have a single generic account for viewing and reporting? If we set-up and account called "CCW records - view and report" with view rights for all the records would this function properly with concurrent users or would each account need to be individual? We are hoping to have a full version of SQL for the back-end if this makes any difference.

Thanks again for the help

Barny

4 Reply by MikeWeideli

  • MikeWeideli
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Re: Assigning access controls by folder or survey

Hi Barnaby

Recorder doesn't mind the same person being logged in muliple times as long as they are on different machines and  as the users will not be able to add any records I  think this approach will be fine.  However it might be an idea to run some test on a network installation to confirm this. Possibly other forum users may already have done this ?

Mike Weideli

MikeWeideli's Website

5 Reply by Gordon Barker

  • Gordon Barker
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Re: Assigning access controls by folder or survey

Yes you can have multiple logins of the same Recorder user across different machines - I have used it for training to be able to enter data and find it to remove afterwards.

Gordon Barker
Biological Survey Data Manager
National Trust