limit access to menu options

[phil]

Ha!! well I am trying to avoid another melt down but the history is rather ugly.... it is illustrative of the personalities though:

http://weberpafrica.blogspot.co.uk

What actually happened is at

http://www.kwamoja.org

The concept was mine but the $PageSecurity tokens were originally hard coded in the script. TIm brought these into the database so you could play with the script tokens too.

[Buz]

Interesting. Well, you have to have some spice in the mix, otherwise working on a product like webERP would be tedious. So I'll take Tim's opinions as an attempt to keep things "spicy". It looks like he's succeeded! I think I'd like both of you. How about the three of us meet for coffee in Atlanta, GA? (there are no emoticons in the forum (that I can see), otherwise I'd add a smiley face! )

I'm quite new to webERP, but so far I'm very impressed and I look forward to greater understanding as I continue to dig in to it. No product like this can be developed without friction and it seems to me that the friction has helped produce a great product. So kudos to both you and Tim, Phil, and I'm sure others that I don't know about.

For what's it's worth, I'd have used a drag-and-drop solution. Create a new user, then drag names of pages from a hierarchical tree onto that user. Entire nodes or leaves. Done. The notion of "role" is a little too strict for me. What if an Accountant-type user needs access to an Inventory function, etc? With this approach, the four steps currently required are reduced to ... one! And it's intuitive to system managers. Any users can be allowed access to any page that the assigning manager deems important. And make changes in an equally intuitive way.

Naturally, this idea is purely theoretical, so perhaps for the next release?

Buz

[phil]

Yes I think a drag n drop solution with a pictorial representation/tree view would be great, maybe possible with a healthy dose of javascript too now, but too tough for me.

[Buz]

There are alternative solutions to the tree that are easy to implement. One's attached. It's from the open source Windows Grep and uses two lists. You choose members of the Include list on the right and migrate to the other using the left-facing arrow. Likewise, you can remove a member of the target list by selecting it and clicking on the right-facing arrow, which causes it to re-appear in the Include list.

Of course you may not be interested, Phil, but I think this approach would nicely simplify assigning pages to a user. Even if you don't like it, it's good to think outside the box, no?

Buz

[phil]

Well we are a bit more sophisticated that this - as we are actually defining role with authority levels and any number of users can be given that role - so we don't need to reinvent the permissions for each user at all.

There are many ways to skin a cat though and what we has works well - just need to get one's head around it.