WINDEV Concepts

128 Part 4: Advanced concept User Groupware in practice 1 Overview An application must define the role of different contributors. Several access levels can be defined according to the user. All users have different responsibilities and requirements. Their field of action must therefore be more or less limited. Let’s take a simple example: a sales management application that offers the following features: • View prices, • Modify prices, • Enter orders, • Entering customers. Access may vary according to the user. For example: • administrative assistants can see the price list and create orders. • sales representatives can see the price list, place orders and create new customers. • sales directors have access to all options. To manage these access levels in your WINDEV applications, simply integrate the User Groupware. In just a few clicks, a standard application can be transformed into an application that manages several access levels. This feature can be easily implemented. When starting the application, the manager will be able to create users (identified by their username and password) and give them access to some application features. 2 How does User Groupware work? An application that uses the User Groupware has two levels: • user level. • supervisor level. 2.1 User level The user logs in to the application and accesses the available features. Remark: You can also log in using an LDAP directory. 2.2 Supervisor level The supervisor logs in to the application and accesses an advanced menu to configure users and their rights, or to start the application. The configuration window allows the supervisor to: • start the application. • configure the groupware. Configuring the groupware consists in creating and associating users and groups, and managing the rights granted to each user (or group) on each window of the application. Rights can be defined for menu options, groups of controls and controls. The supervisor can gray out these elements, make them inactive or invisible. These configurations take precedence over any configuration defined in the program. For more information on the groupware configuration defined by the supervisor, see Configuring the application that uses the User Groupware. Remark : The information regarding the users and their rights is stored in data files in HFSQL format (Classic or Client/Server).