Preparing To Make Changes To Access Rights

Collect! menus, forms and fields may be customized in many ways to provide the functionality you need. This ability to dramatically change the format of your Collect! environment is a powerful feature when used correctly. It is important to prepare any changes you may want to make and to be aware beforehand of the effects these changes will have for your users.

Collect! ships with sample User Levels that grant very reasonable Access Rights to different levels of operators. We recommend using the carefully planned default settings in Collect! for a while before attempting to customize the program's display. It is very possible that you might want to make a small change to an existing Level, for instance, making one more field accessible or not, or taking away delete rights at one particular spot.

It is best advised that you do not try to change everything all at once. Take one step at a time and test. Try out changes in the Demonstration database. When you are comfortable the changes you have tried, then you may apply them to your Masterdb database. You could even work on an exact copy of your existing user levels, make and test your changes, and when you are satisfied, copy a few files to your Masterdb database and be up and running.

When you make changes to Collect!'s user interface, the underlying values of menus, forms and fields remain the same. This means that the number and name of each menu choice, form and field is still the same and the data type handled by the field does not change. For instance, a date field is still a date field even if you change its caption to "Interest." The printable information report writer code for the field remains the same. For instance, you would still use @de.na to bring the Debtor Name into a report, even if you are calling it the Patient Name.

The Demonstration database has been set up to show the functionality of access rights, using user levels. Before making changes, it is a good idea to examine the Demonstration database to get an idea of what Collect! can do for you.

The easiest way to make a changes is to customize one of the pre-defined user levels that is closest to your needs.

To view sample settings, select System from the top menu bar and then select Rights, User Levels. Try signing into Collect! with the sample Operators provided to see what each user level can do.

You must sign out of Collect! completely, returning to the Desktop, whenever you change to a different User Level, or some of the rights from the previous level that you were signed in as may still be in effect.

After making changes to access rights, it is very important to rebuild rights. Sign into Collect! in EXCLUSIVE mode at User Level 99 and select System, Rights, Access Rights. Select the REBUILD button to update Collect! to recognize any changes you may have made.

Restricting user access to forms may result in unexpected behavior. So this must be carefully thought out in all its ramifications. For instance, if you make a form No Access while allowing the user to choose it from a pick list, they will not be able to complete the command. This is also true when a user runs a contact plan that updates a form. The user must have Full Access to the form to update it. This is also true of reports that writeback to the database.

It may be useful to actually hide a field or button so that the user does not even see it. Additional areas for consideration are Web Host access and Client access. You may want to restrict access to your database in those ways also.

See Also

- How To Set Field Or Form Properties