CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello Civi friends!

We have a scenario where we need to restrict some users to only access specific groups of contacts. There are 5 different user types and a number of groups for each, so thought the easiest way to handle this would be to use Civi's parent function within groups. I hoped that if you granted access to the parent group, access would also be given to the children. Unfortunately, this isn't the case!

Is this normal Civi function? Is it possible to adjust this? If so, where would I start to look? For this user, it would provide a great long term solution as they wouldn't have to add new acls for every group as long as it was the child of the right one.

Thanks!

Heather O.

Hi Pete,

That's a really interesting solution. I didn't realise that relationship permissions were inherited. Good to know!

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that will fully work for them. Each of the 5 user types will have a number of groups they need to use with the mailings module (between 5 - 10 at the minute and likely to grow!) which is why we went with the parent / child approach. It would mean that when new groups are added, they just need to be put with the right parent and then they will be able to access and we won't have to manage 100+ potential acls.

Do you think it's possible to adjust how the group acl permissions work? Any ideas where we might look?

Many thanks,

Heather.

Hi Pete,

Thanks for taking the time to help!

There are 5 projects sharing one installation and users can only access contacts who are part of their project. Each project needs to use the full functions of CiviCRM. The idea was, if we had a parent group for each project, all the children groups could be accessible, particularly for mailings and they would be able to manage their own groups within their parent group going forward. Otherwise, we have to set up a new group and acls for them each time.

The main reason for going for this approach is each project has between 5 - 10 unique mailing lists they regularly distribute information to via CiviMail (one of the main areas of their work).

Parent 1 = Project
- Child 1a Mailing list
- Child 1b Mailing list
- Child 1c Mailing list
- Child 1d Mailing list
- Child 1e Mailing list
- Child 1f Mailing list
- Child 1g Mailing list
- Child 1h Mailing list
- Child 1i Mailing list
- Child 1j Mailing list

And the same for each 5 partners. So this would be 50 groups that require acls setting up now but this is will continue to grow. They will regularly be adding / updating groups as they are funded for specific pieces of work to carry out with their contacts that meet certain criteria (in a specific area, support specific users). So adding smart groups and enabling them to access any groups within their parent would give them a really flexible way to manage their data.

We've also had an issue recently on another site where group acls aren't working as expected when you have more than one, so I'm not confident that it will work for that many groups.

Many thanks,

Heather.