Setting Team Access to a Record

Once you have finished created your apps you may want to set team securities to your records to differentiate the users which has permission to edit or read the record or has no access to the record. This is known in Softools as Record Access Rights in which there are three types of security rights being None, Full and ReadOnly access rights.

There are 3 ways to set team access being:

Manually
With an Expression
With a Lookup

Access rights which are set as None has no access to the record and users or teams with these rights cannot edit or read the record. ReadOnly rights allows them to only read through the record but cannot make changes to the record in which is possible with full access rights. Then if you have set up a team on your set you can set the Record Access Rights to the different teams.

There are three ways of accomplishing this which is by setting team access manually, from an expression or by a lookup. It is best practice to avoid setting record access rights manually. As the other methods set the access rights automatically making it easier and quicker to use especially if many records are expected to be created.

Setting Team Access Manually

Setting up team access manually is simple, first select the record which you want to select Team access rights.

Then click on the ellipses so that it will show a drop-down menu to reveal the Securities tab.

It will now take you into a pop-up menu to reveal the current access rights of the record. By default, only the creator of the record has full access rights and no other user or team is able to have access to this record. To change the access rights to the record click onto the Add Row button.

Then onto the new row change the Type to Team which would then allow you to select the Team to change access rights to on the Team column in which you can then change the access rights in the Access column to the access rights you wish to change to. Once all the access rights are set click onto the Save button and thus should be completed.

Setting Team Access via an Expression

To set team access from an expression it requires the usage of the Team field and a selection list. This method works by creating a selection list with the names of all the teams you want to use. Then by creating a team field which obtains its value from an expression where it uses an if statement to return a team ID from the selection list. Once the value of the team has been selected a workflow would then be triggered to set the access rights for the team. This method must be kept up to date by an app builder, so if a new team is added a builder would need to add it to the expression and selection list.

Configuration

To start we would first need to create a selection list and add the teams we want use for the app then click on Save.

Once that’s completed go onto the app and create a Selection field and use the selection list we have just created.

Then add a team field which we will use in our workflow.

Then under the expressions we will use an if statement which you can find out more here.

Finding Team Information

The expression will work by obtaining the ID from the teams app which is found on the grid icon at the top left of the site then by clicking onto the gear button so that the team app becomes visible. Once you have entered the team's app you should find the list of teams you want to use and by clicking onto the record you can find their ID.

Adding the Expression

The expression should look like the expression in the image below by using an if statement to find if the Team selection field is equal to its ID.

if([Team] = 'Demo', '615569c806b3894dd965d6bb', if([Team] = 'Test', '613f4e9f0334b915f426756b', ''))

Then add the selection field to the template to allow users of the site to select the teams.

Adding Workflows

Now comes the part where we add the workflows in which you go onto the Workflow V2 menu and click on Add which should take you to a page like the image below and give it a description to indicate what it’s purpose. If you are not familiar with Workflow V2 or would like to learn more about it you can find it here.

For the trigger node we will need to create multiple workflows for when a field is updated or if a record is created in this example field updated is used.

After the trigger node, a filter node is created to add some requirements to the workflow so a requirement used could be if the Team field is not empty.

Finally, comes the action node where the node type would need to be Update Record. The action for this node can then be to set ReadOnly access rights or to set full access rights but choose which ever works best for your site and select the Team field in the Target Team Field section, and now the workflow is complete. Which by then another similar workflow is needed but for the other trigger node which would be record create in this example.

Should both workflows be completed the workflow page should look similar to the image below and you can begin testing the workflow.

Once you have resynced the app hopefully now if you select a team from the selection list if should update the record access rights for the team.

Setting Team Access via a Lookup

If you are not familiar with lookup fields you can read more about it here, but essentially it allows an app to pull information from a different app. For this context we will use this lookup app to store the information of the teams and use workflows to set access rights. This method can be kept up to date by non app builders as they just need to add a new team by creating the records in the look up app.