Categories for managing content permissions

[unknown-user]

Hi,

Is there a way to manage permissions using Categories?

For E.g
a) Category called "public-documents" - viewable to all users
b) Category called "marketing-only" - viewable only by users from Marketing team.

If the above is achievable, how does it work with Users and Groups? Can we use the above categories to move documents to two different sites? A public site and Marketing only site? Also, are Categories available through Forms service in Share? 

Thanks

[jpotts]

I'm not sure why you'd want to use categories to drive permissions, but regardless of the reason, sure, it can be done. You'd write a Java behavior that would trigger when categories are set. It would then set the permissions appropriately. You'd have to do some sort of mapping between categories or category name patterns and the permissions you want to set.

Same for moving documents around. You can inspect the category as part of a behavior or a rule and then move the documents as you see fit.

Yes, categories are available from the form service in Share.

Jeff

[unknown-user]

Thanks Jeff.

We would probably use the out of the box permission model itself to manage the permissions. The thought process behind using categories was to enable the users to get to their documents with out needing to remember which site their documents belong to. Also, while uploading if they select a category we could determine in the background which site the document needs to go based on our rule. But now we are thinking of giving a custom search form through which users searches for their documents. We may have to give a custom upload form as well.

Is there a way we can create a page in Alfresco which is not associated to a site? I understand that we can make a custom page the landing page for Alfresco, but is there any other way to do it? Basically, we want users to see our simplified UI rather than the personal/site dashboards 

Thanks

[ivanatap]

Hi Jeff,

Could you please give me some basic example how to use categories to drive permissions?
We want to set up document security level based on metadata in our Alfresco DMS system, and we realized that the best way to do that is using categories, if I'm right.

Thanks in advance,
Ivana

[jpotts]

I don't have time to code up an example, but the high-level approach is given earlier in the thread:

Step 1: Write a Java behavior. Look at this tutorial for clues as to how to do that. The behavior can watch for when the doc gets added to a category.

Step 2: Set the permissions. Within the behavior, when the doc has been added to a category, grab the category, then decide what permissions to set based on the category. Then use the permissions service to set the permissions on the node (see the setPermission method on org.alfresco.repo.security.permissions.impl.PermissionServiceImpl).

Jeff