Author Topic: Smarter smart groups (Read 1050 times)

capo · May 10, 2014, 12:36:38 pm

Last Wednesday we had a session of the CiviCRM Madrid work group about ACL's and, in general, permissions. There was a few of different organizations and we all realized that we use to have the same needs, talking about permissions. Users from a state/province must access contacts from it's own state/province, and so on.

During the session, we arrived to this conclusions that are probably shared with a lot of other organizations:

CiviCRM is out-of-the-box able to handle almost all the permission environments we may need
The configuration can be hard to maintain, specially when working with organizations that have a lot of (normally regional) groups

My question is, may Doctrine Query Language be used to facilitate the creation of "smarter smart groups"? I mean, if the logic of querying is finally moved to the doctrine layer, it won't be hard to make available for the queries parameters about the user logged in (or the corresponding API user running a command).

If we had this information available, we may be able to create smart groups such as: "Contacts from the state/province of the logged user" (I'm using state/province just as an example). This group would show contacts from a different state/province depending on the user logged in. If we could create this kind of smart groups, ACL configurations would be much simpler, I guess.

Would it be possible to access information about the logged user from the doctrine layer? Or am I just maybe wrong?

xavier · May 18, 2014, 03:18:29 am

WHen you have complex access rights like that (staff from region X can see the constituents from that region only) where you have quite a lot of regions, it's probably easier to write an extension handling custom ACL.

Not sure it can be made generic, but might be worthwhile sharing as a starting point. I seem to remember the green AU have something like that. Pete or Eileen, is this something you have to share?

petednz · May 18, 2014, 01:48:36 pm

we have used a number of approaches - eg ACLs running off custom fields, or running off Relationships - and of course the multisite approach. But i don't think either of the first two are very generic and hence are not packaged up and able to be passed around.

capo · May 21, 2014, 02:21:09 am

I wrote my question into the 5.0 Saloon because I wasn't looking for a solution with current development possibilities. What I meant is that, if a link to the logged user is available at the Docrine layer, we'd have a new world of possibilities.

I'll try to explain it a bit better.

Now, you can easily create a smart group that dinamically shows contacts from, lets say, Madrid. In that case, the where_clause at civicrm_saved_search would be something like:

Code: [Select]

 ( civicrm_address.state_province_id IN (2452) )

But, imagine that:

The current where_clause at the civicrm_group and civicrm_saved_search tables was replaced by a where_dql_clause.
The ID of the logged user was available from the Doctrine layer.

Then, we would be able to write DQL conditions like:

Code: [Select]

(
    civicrm_address.state_province_id IN (
        SELECT
            logged_user_address.state_province_id
        FROM civicrm_address AS logged_user_address
        WHERE
            logged_user_address.contact_id = :logged_user_id
    )
)

The powerful thing about it, is that this group, would show different sets of contacts depending on the user who's querying it.

It means that, by changing the search user interface, adding the posibility of using tokens related to the information of the logged user, CiviCRM administrators would be able to do a lot of things that now only developers can do.

Note:
The big deal about this proposal would be to identify the groups that are using information about the logged user in their where_dql_clauses, so we could generate a per user group contact cache.

petednz · May 21, 2014, 01:38:10 pm

got you - well not the detail - but yes the idea that this is a deeper concept that how we tackle it currently - will mossie on out of the saloon

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Author Topic: Smarter smart groups (Read 1050 times)

capo

Smarter smart groups

xavier

Re: Smarter smart groups

petednz

Re: Smarter smart groups

capo

Re: Smarter smart groups

petednz

Re: Smarter smart groups