Layers of access to data

[Peter Knowles]

I've been trying to wrap my mind around a way to serve a variety of information to different audiences based on their status, and figure it must be a common procedure, so someone out there has it figured out. If so, I'd love to know how best to give different groups access to different records. Here's what I want to do:

In our school's calendar database some events are primarily for staff, some are for staff & students (basically, the school community) and some are for everyone (general public, staff & students). Currently, when the records are created they're coded in the "audience" field as "staff", "students", or "general". However, when searching for staff items, results have to include all three levels; when searching for students, they need to include two levels, and when searching for public, they need to include only the "public" category.

That last one I can handle; it's the others that I'm struggling with. Should I assign numerical point values to each group, and search by some summary field? Or should I structure the hyperlink search tag differently (instead of audience.eq.staff, do something else). There seems to be a problem getting the db to serve subsets of the main category, or something. I have a sense there must be an easy and smart (and, probably, painfully obvious?) way to approach this. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[Garry Claridge]

Are you using Custom Web Publishing (CWP)?

If you are using CDML you may need to note the login type and structure your [FMP-If] tags to suit.

One way to look at the logic is:

if type=public -> search==public

if type=student -> search<>staff

if type=staff -> Findall

Good Luck.

Garry

[Peter Knowles]

Thanks Garry.

I am using CDML tags (in Dreamweaver-created pages) if that makes a difference.

So you think stucturing the search request using [FMP-IF], [FMP-ELSE] tags in a nested arrangement is what I need to do? (from the CDML/Web page side, rather than creating a separate field that performs the same function?

BTW: Can you nest if/else arguments? I didn't think you could.

Peter

[Garry Claridge]

I'm assuming that you have some kind of User table that is queried before the events are displayed. The returned Format file can contain the following:

[FMP-If: user_type .eq. staff]

[FMP-InlineAction: ....findall....] ... [/FMP-InlineAction]

[FMP-ElseIf: user_type .eq. student]

[FMP-InlineAction: event_type <> staff] ... [/FMP-InlineAction]

[FMP-Else]

[FMP-InlineAction: event_type == public] ... [/FMP-InlineAction]

[/FMP-If]

All the best.

Garry