This page is for PhixFlow administrators to set up default options that external users will have when they access PhixFlow. For related information, see the User Administration topic.

Overview

If your PhixFlow instance is integrated with a system-wide authentication system, you may have users who can log into PhixFlow without previously having a user account. These users are known as external users. When they log in, PhixFlow needs to know what privileges to give external users. You configure external user privileges by matching user groups in your external system with user groups in PhixFlow; see Configure Groups for External Login.

When an external user logs into PhixFlow for the first time, PhixFlow creates a user account for them. The user account has a subset of the options available for local PhixFlow users; see User for details. The minimal user account includes:

• their user name
• a default locale, copied from the System Configuration → General Settings → System Locale.

You may have groups of users who: 

• only use a subset of your PhixFlow applications
• work in different parts of the world, and need to have different locales.

In these cases, you can create external user templates. In each template you can set different defaults for specific external user groups. If a user belongs to an external user group specified in the template, when they log in, PhixFlow creates the user account with the defaults from the template.

Basic Settings

Field	Description
Name	The name of this external user template.
Order	The order of this template. If there are multiple templates, PhixFlow checks them in order until it finds a matching external group name. To check or change the order for multiple templates, see System Configuration.
External Groups	One or more names of the external login groups that will be mapped to this external user template. If you want to include the PhixFlow instance (such as test or production) in the external group name, use {instance}; see Configure Groups for External Login. Separate multiple names with a semi-colon. Spaces are taken to be part of the group name. PhixFlow does not validate the group names, so you need to make sure they exactly match the group names in your external system.
External Groups Evaluated	Read-only. If you use {instance} PhixFlow displays the names of the external login groups with the variable replaced by the instance name.
Default Locale	Required. The locale to use in the user account.
Default Application	The default application to use in the user account.
Default Open in Design Mode	The default view to use in the user account, either   Design Mode or  App Mode.

How PhixFlow Decides Which Template To Use

A user may belong to multiple external groups. To determine which template to use, PhixFlow works through the list of templates in their Order.  It compares each external group name that is listed and checks with the external authentication system to find out if the user belongs to that group. When PhixFlow finds a matching group it uses that external user template. Once it has a match, PhixFlow does not continue to check the other templates. If PhixFlow finds no matching user group, it uses the last template.

In summary, if the user is in an external group that is listed:

• in multiple templates, the first one is used
• in no template, the last one is used.