This page is for application designers who need to specify which users can access an application.
Overview
Once an application is complete and ready for use, you need to configure the privileges that the application users require. To learn more about users, user groups, roles and privileges, see Managing User Groups and Privileges.
From version 9.0 onwards, PhixFlow automatically creates 2 user groups for applications:
appname
for people who need to use the applicationappname_Admin
for people who need to manage the application and user access to it.
appname
is the same as the application's name. For applications created in versions earlier than 9.0, you must create these user groups.
Use the application user groups to set up user access to your application before making it available; see Configuring Application User Privileges, below.
Planning User Access to Application Screens
Remember that when you design an application, you will have different types of user. For each type of user:
- Consider all the screens that they need to access.
- Decide if they start on the application's home screen, or if they need a different landing screen.
- You may want a subset of users to open your application on a specific screen (not the application's home screen). For example the application manager may need access to task-specific options.
- Determine the routes that that allow them to get to screens from their landing page.
- Add navigation menus and buttons so that users can follow these routes.
- In the properties for items, leave access open to:
- Close access to actions: untick All Users Can Run Action.
For greater control over access to parts of your application, you can consider restricting access to screens, data tables and views. You must then add the specific user groups to each item. This can be useful if you want application users to navigate to the screens only using action buttons. You can also control access to actions buttons; see Controlling Access Using Action Buttons below.
We do not recommend restricting access to screens, tables views and actions, as providing user access per item becomes complex and hard to manage.
Configuring Application User Privileges
You must configure roles for:
- application users with the following privileges
- Run Actions
- View Applications
- View Dashboards
- View Data
- View Components
- View Styles
- View Filters
- View Menu Items
- View Menus
- View Streams
- View Stream Actions
- View Stream Views
- View Styles
- application managers, with the privileges they require.
You can configure the roles:
- either in the Full Repository, if you want all applications to use the same role
- or in the application-specific repository, if you want to create a separate role for each application.
Step 1 Configure Roles and Privileges
- In either the Full Repository, or the application-specific repository, right-click Role and select Create New.
- In the role properties, set Basic Settings → Name. For example:
- for application users:
AppUser
- for application managers:
AppAdmin
- for application users:
- In the Roles section toolbar, click Roles to open the list of roles.
- Drag in the privileges for the role.
- Click Apply and Close to save and close the new role.
If you configure the roles in the Full Repository, you only need to do this once.
Step 2 Configure Users
If PhixFlow does not already have user accounts for your application users, ask your administrator to add them; see User.
Optionally Set Defaults
If a user only requires access to one application, configure Basic Settings → Default Application; see User.
If user requires a task-specific landing screen, configure Basic Settings → Default Dashboard.
Step 3 Configure User Groups in the Application
- In the application-specific repository, expand User Groups and open the application's user group.
- Find the
AppUser
orAppAdmin
role:- For roles created within the application, in the Roles section toolbar click Roles to open a list.
- For roles created in the Full Repository, open the repository in a pane next to the user group properties and navigate to the role.
- Drag the role from the list/repository into the Role section.
- In the Users section of the user group properties, Users to open a list.
- Drag users from the list into the Users section.
Controlling Access Using Action Buttons
- Create a set of user groups to represent all application user roles.
- To each user group, add access to the actions buttons that the group of users need to access:
- tasks
- other dashboards
- Only associate the privileges specifically for this role, not for this role and everything “underneath” it.
- At least one user group must contain the AppUser role.
- Layer the user groups onto the users so that they end up with the access they need.