Population-based Permissions
- Helen Williams
Using population-based permissions is the way to restrict access to only certain records in the database for specific users.
Most commonly this is used for application review committees, where an individual user (faculty reviewer) can access Slate and the Reader, but only see records in the program for which they are a admissions committee member. However it is useful in any shared database where groups of records need to be segregated/restricted from groups of users.
Key Guidelines
System permissions are the “regular” permissions in Slate that grant access to the majority of records, tools, and functionality. Not all system permissions work for population-based permissions; only a sub-set that target person records and application records function for population-based permissioning.
Both system permissions and populations relate to either person records or application records; to work properly it seems necessary to assign person record permissions through person-scoped populations and application record permissions through application-scoped populations.
When assigning population-based permissions it is very important that any system permission that should be restricted by population not be assigned through the main “Permissions” tab and should only be assigned through the “Populations” tab in the user account.
inherited for records in a selected population, as opposed to all records.
The key to making population-based permissions work is to only assign population-capable permissions through the populations tab and to assign the other general permissions through the main populations tab.