Proposal number : ? Proposal title : Permissions Changes - Editing and Ownership

Date	2009/03/23
Contact(s)	Simon Pigot
Last edited	Timestamp
Status	draft - complete in BlueNetMEST sandbox
Assigned to release	2.4
Resources	Available

Overview

As of 2.2 Editing rights were removed and bundled with ownership. For many workflows (the majority perhaps) this means that ownership must be transferred by a user-admin or above in order for any other user (even one in the same group) to be able to edit the record. In addition, the transfer ownership (prior to the implementation of the massive new owner operation - see MoreMassiveOperations) operation could only transfer all records belonging to one user to another.

Restoration of editing rights also means that they must be included in the database setup, privileges screens and users who have editing rights must see 'Create' and 'Edit' buttons not just 'Create'.

It was also not clear when a registered user was viewing the summary of records returned from a search:

• who owns the record
• what categories it belongs too and what the privileges are on the record.

It is proposed that the summary of records returned by a search should show:

• who the owner is
• privileges and categories buttons (clicking on the button will show details but only the owner of the record can change them - they are disabled for everyone else)

A light-weight alternative to this is may be to show a visual indicator of whether the current user is the owner or not (eg. using the lock-unlock icons) and whether the record is published to all/intranet/internal (using a green/orange/red traffic light signal).

Proposal Type

• Type: User interface and core functionality additions
• App: GeoNetwork
• Module: Metadata XSLTs, Datamanager (add some additional fields to geonet:info)

Links

• This has been available in the BlueNetMEST sandbox for some time - tested by users in the BlueNet project

Voting History

• None yet

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Motivations

Workflow impaired by bundling editing rights with ownership.

Permissions and ownership should be visible to registered users who have view/publish rights on a record. This is analogus to a filesystem where if a user can see a file then they can see the permissions on that file and who owns it.

Proposal

See overview.

Backwards Compatibility Issues

Reintroduction of editing rights to the OperationsAllowed table means that existing 2.2 installations will need to modify this table by hand.

Risks

Participants

• As above