Form for every user or a better way?

[JJobe]

We have a school student/address database setup with about 500 students. Previously this was used by one or two secretaries, but now that we have FileMaker Server we would like teachers to be able to look up student addresses if needed. The catch is that we only want teachers to be able to see addresses for students in their own classes. FileMaker Server seems to have nothing built into it for permissions, and the permissions built into FileMaker don't seem appropriate for this either. It was suggested that we may need to make a form for each and every teacher and write FileMaker scripting that limits teachers to seeing their own form. Is this correct? This seems like a long backwards way to accomplish the goal. Thank you. John J.

[Anatoli]

Is 5 - 10 minutes "long backwards way"?

[Kurt Knippel]

A form is just a way to view a set of data, it makes no difference what that data is, that is NOT part of the form.

One form for every teacher does nothing other than make you create lots of forms.

What you need to do is to either control what records the teachers are allowed to see via Filemaker Pro 5.x built-in record level security OR use finds to control which records teacher are allowed to search for.

[CobaltSky]

There is another way to approach this problem.

1. Add a text field to the database in which you enter (as a carriage return separated list) the names of users who will be allowed to 'see' that record.

2. Create a global text field called 'gCurrentUser' and then create a self-join relationship which matches the global field to the text field referred to at 1 above.

3. Add a login procedure to the start-up script which writes the current user access key/name to the gCurrentUser global field.

4. Display student's details in a portal layout which is dependent on the relationship desribed at 2 above.

Staff will then see only records for which they have access (as per the access list in the text field. Since global values are particular to each client workstation, each machine will log in and view a different selection of students.

If your access privileges are set up appropriately, you may be able to leverage the existing username or group details using Status(CurrentUserName) or Status(CurrentGroups) to capture staff privileges. Since the username is particular to the workstation, that has the limitation that everyone using a particular computer will see the same group of students. It is also none too secure, since users can change the username (via Edit>Application>Preferences) at will. CurrentGroups is more secure, but may not be the most efficient way to differentiate a sizeable number of users.

Alternatively, you might consider establishing a related database of staff, access keys and passwords, and have them 'log in' via a custom screen, after which (provided they enter a password which corresponds to the access key they have selected) their access key is written (by script) to the global field and they are taken to the portal layout.

This will provide straightforward listing capability, so staff will be able to look up or list a sorted (eg alhpabetical) list of students. Alternative sort options and searching (portal filtering) would also be possible if a greater level of finesse is required.

[jasonwood]

Thanks Ray! That's a great answer. It gave me some ideas too.

Instead of entering "who" is allowed to see the record, simply enter the course codes the student is registered in (this may be better simply because it might already be there).

Then the teacher could enter the course code to see students in the course.

To add a bit of security, you could set it up so that each course has a little "password"... a couple of extra characters after the regular course code which are unique to each course).

eg: CP102-6425 (where 6425 is the password assigned for CP102)

(Alternatively, you could just use a "course code" which is not used universally.)

Teachers would then have to know their course number and the course password, which they could enter as above to see the students in the portal.

Hope that made sense!