Administrator’s Guide

Permissions

The tracker has a fine-grained permissions system, so that an administrator can assign rights to individual users very precisely.

Roles

The main way permissions are assigned is through roles. A role assigns a set of permissions to a set of users. Users can be in many different roles, and get all the permissions from all of their roles.

Almost all roles are attached to a study. The permissions within these roles are automatically scoped to that study, and have no effect anywhere else in the system. This means that a study administrator can create and modify roles for that study without having privacy effects on any other study.

Administrators

There are two kinds of administrator in the tracker:

• Study administrators look after an individual study, and have delegated permissions that allow them to do more or less anything within that study.
• System administrators have permissions to create studies, and assignment permissions that extend beyond a single study.

System administrators are set through a special role is ROLE_ADMIN, which is a attached to a special “pseudo-study”, called ADMIN. All roles in this “pseudo-study” are not scoped, and can therefore set permissions that extend across studies.

TASK

To add a new system administrator, navigate to the ROLE_ADMIN and add their username to the role. From then on, they’ll be able to manage the system.

Users

Users are defined very simply, by a principal name. This is usually either a login name, or if LDAP authentication is being used, it’s the userPrincipalName field in the LDAP records.

Roles have a set of users and a set of permissions.

Study permissions

The tracker provides the following permissions for use within a study.

view

The view permission means the users in the role can see the study in their display when they log in to the tracker. No detailed views or data can be accessed, but the existence of the study is apparent. And that’s all.

create

The create permission lets users create new records. It’s normally only relevant if the user has access to a view where they can create records (although in theory a service user might also use this permission to create new records without going through the interface).

delete

The delete permission lets users delete records. It’s normally only relevant if the user has access to a view where they can delete records (although in theory a service user might also use this permission to delete records without going through the interface).

read:view

The read permission allows read access to a named view, or the view can be a wildcard *, which grants read access to all views. The view will be shown under the study, and can be selected from the login page, but there aren’t any editing options displayed, and the data can’t be changed.

write:view

The write permission allows write access to a named view, or the view can be a wildcard *, which grants write access to all views. The view will be shown under the study, and can be selected from the login page. Also, a toggle button is displayed which allows data to be edited within the view.

attribute:read/write:name

This permission grants read or write access to a given attribute. For example, to grant all permissions, you can use attribute:*:*, to grant only data read access you can use attribute:read:*. However, you can use it to control fine-grained permissions, such as: attribute:read:* with attribute:write:att1,att2,..., which lets users in that role read all attributes, but only write the explicitly named ones. This provides a very powerful and focused control over an individual attribute field.

download:view

The download permission allows download access to a named view, or the view can be a wildcard *, which grants download access to all views. If the view is accessible (via read) an additional download button will be offered, which lets people download the data in an Excel spreadsheet format.

System permissions

There are also a few system permissions. These only apply for roles attached to the special “pseudo-study”, called ADMIN.

admin

Users with the admin permission are allowed to create new studies.