record privileges & separation model

[mscholtz]

I can't seem to figure out how this would work. It may be simple, but I'm not seeing the way forward.

The setup:

One backend (data) file, with two different front-end (UI) files, both connecting to that same back-end. The two FE's in effect are two separate applications (they'll almost never be used simultaneously by the same person, and many users will never use both) but they share certain data.

Let's call these FE's App A, and App B.

In particular they both use a table (Households) as a primary data element. The wrinkle is that each app should have access to only some of the records in this table. App A will have access to most, but not all, of the Households, while App B should only see those that are engaged in a particular process. At any time, an App A Household could start that process, at which time it needs to start being accessible to App B.

There are of course many ways to make something like this happen. But it seems the simplest would be to use Privilege Sets to control the access. My thought was to add 2 flag fields to the Households table, with each one indicating access for one of the FE's. Then use custom record privileges to control View/Edit access based on those flags.

The problem: record-level privileges have to be set in file the table resides in, in this case the back end. So I can't have different privilege sets in each front end. And we'll in general be using external authentication on Mac OS, so I don't want to set up separate accounts to be used for each front-end.

Given all of the above, is there any way to do this using privilege sets? Basically I want the permissions to behave differently depending on which front-end is being used, even though the account for the back-end file is the same.

Hopefully this makes some sense. Thanks for any help!

[mscholtz]

I think I figured this out. The calculation for record permissions seems to allow you to reference a global. So I can just set the global when the FE opens, reference it in the calc, and all should be fine.

I don't know why I assumed this wouldn't be possible. For some reason I assumed that the calc for record-level permission would have to be "stored" (i.e. referencing stored fields in that table only).

The only limitation I foresee is that I won't be able to let users have both FE's open simultaneously. But that's probably not a big stumbling block.