Good (whatever time of the day it is where you live), Blatant

Hi jchrono, I was interested by your question, had this issue before!

I;m UK so it's 20 past 3...

And a good {time of day} to you too! :)

I'm in New England

so it's 10:23 AM here.

Thanks! Anyways, so about my problem..

a good morning to you then :)

basically, I work at a University with 234 odd departments.

Yea, I've been poking about, if we were rolling our own we're gonna need the most extensive extension ever! lol

We need implement a records management system (the State is requiring us) and due to powers beyond my control, there WON'T be a single records managment controller, each department will handle their own records.

There's 2 sides of course, 1 is setting the fields, I think Zoo Visitor and a checkbox list might be best suited here

so you'll have 'group admins' so to speak, and group members...

Hrmm, does Zoo Visitor hook into the Member Profile in the CP? I'm going to need some to train someone how to add new users and select their appropriate department.

Zoo Visitor creates a channel that links to users, allowing better (MHO) fields

but for example we can assume its a member field (Zoo Vis also redirects the Register a member screen)

FYI: I'm at work so I'm gonna be in and out, have to get some actual work done too!

I would say something like 2 Member groups, one that allows a user to manage the group members, one for just the group members...

I appreciate your help very much! I'm also at work, but since we're working on my problem I can get away with it :)

OK so with Zoo Visitor I can use any field type for member fields? That was my initial nightmare with the member fields, because each department is like "College of this and that" and the department ID's are lie "B103054", meaning the member field "select" was useless.

(because you can only give it a single value per row, not a label and a value)

sure, but a group of checkboxes will work wont it, checkbox value=B103054 label=College of this and that

then the moderators can tick the relivent ones

in short with channel fields / Zoo Visitors we can devise a way to set the access permission, so the bigger question is how to apply the permissions / map departments to channels

The Zoo Visitor checkbox thing sounds pretty functional for this too, because it means I can generate forms dynamically based on what departments a user has checked off in their profile. As for prevention of a user malforming their form to try and POST to a different department (i seriously doubt theirs a hacker amongst these academics), I think I'd have to do a simple on_submit extension that checked if the submitted records department is checked off in the submitting users profile.

Did you say it was a channel per department?

Also, are we restricting view from front and CP? and also are we controlling Publish from Channel Entries form and CP? or a mash up??

nope! a single channel for every department. I know, it's an interesting problem. It's about record destruction... the State department of Compliance is directing us to create a system to be able to trigger when old documents need to be destroyed. They already have all the guidelines for that put togetehr.

Ahh,good old US law :) Fixed this before by building and hosting a US site in the UK, so UK laws apply lol but thats one hell of a legal workaround!! haha (We had someone from USA sue a client because their Irish website (with US sales portal) conflicted with the US Data Protection laws

Publish and Edit for channel entries is all front end. An Superadmin myself might dick around in the CP, but the only CP access that will be given out to non-developers will be for member managemnt.

afk, brb :) (Java Time)

sorry, caffeine levels runnign low

you're hitting your afternoon low i bet :)

Well I don't mind telling ya, taking the CP out of the question makes the extension alot simpler! Just look at all the publish hooks in CP!

right!

ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/development/…

lol

while you were getting coffee I already told my vice-provost to get Zoo Visitor for this project, she'll buy it as soon as we're done here. But I'm pretty convinced.

Where's the registraation form? Is it front end college sign ups or admin setup only?

I wrote and LDAP module to allow for single-sign one for university members, but i've already decided we aren't going to use that for this project.

I jsut did an SSO for a UK Magento Site to a US ASP site, that was lolz

So from the post point of view, you can parse the member fields to decide to display the entry form

There will probably be one person in records management who just handles personally creating accounts, but I assume with Zoo Visitor we could dump out a registration form with recaptcha somewhere, and shoot them into a pending member group

and for extra security check it on entry_submission_start ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/development/…

yeah, that makes sense. really the only thing that will change on the forms will be what departments show up in a select drop down, and preventing POSTS where the entry department ID isn't checked off for that user.

having 1 channel per department is a sviour too, as you can name the channels with the department ID's, save's complicated mapping :)

Well yea, doesn't sound too painful now, I was thinking about limiting the CP

unfortunately, we're already down the rabbit hole with this one channel thing, so we're binded to it.

its a good thing :D

when in doubt, fuck users, they will only get what we give them.

yeah, i think i'll turn off publish in the CP even for the member management users, and just deal with the front end.

ROFL-copter "Fuck the users" = web developers quote of the day

its a safer bet, or get member managers to sign off on the "YOu can effect other departments, but we're asking you to sign off that you won;t"

would you have used categories on a single channel rather than 1 channel per dept if you had the choice though?? I find I avoid categories unless I can't

lol! yeaup. also, i wouldn't recommend building applications for PhD folks... it's like pulling teeth from an already buried horse. Dude, 300+ grad students, professors, and who knows (profs tend to dump this work on the lowliest person they can) else, this needs to locked down.

I feel for ya, my previous employment was for a medical research company run by some Md's (or PhD folks)

not the same but we where managing antibiotic response data from thousands of doctors submitted across the country

Yeah, the reason my boss (he started this app) is using a text channel field for record ownership is because he already a mysql table separate from EE with all of the departments and department ID's in it

If I had a $ for every time I had to field a "It wouldn't be too much work to change how we handle X to be Y, would it??"

thats not too bad though, text field's a bit whack tho!

(I have a meeting in 5mins, but will be bak in half an hour if we don't wrap up before)

lol yes! dude, all day, err day, i get asked things that people assume are simple ("can we create reports based on any field in this very complicated ERD?", "NOPE, I'm not building you a reporting engine")

Cool, well I think we got the most of it in! I really appreciate your consultation mang, Zoo Visitor is definitely the solution I'll go with. I think I get can it locked down.

I remembe the days I could say "No" to a request like that...

Nowadays I just add 10 days (like $20000) to the quote lol

Hey No probs, I see you active every day so happy to help a fellow peer :)

lol yeah, that's what my boss does for every insane request we get (Sure, no problem, got 80k in funding to hire an engineer for that?)

Oh and congrats on getting the Moderator vote :)

Thanks man! Yeah I see you rocking the exchange. Thanks for your help again, and I'll see ya on the boards. Have a good meeting!

just drop me a line any time, always happy to help and discuss tech :)

Yea, silent for 2 years then big rep for 2 months lol

/me flashes in the pan

:S

lulz it happens

anyway, meeting, be back in 30 if your still here

gl

Meeting Cancelled, = big win 100% success

I'm going to be implimenting an enterprise security policy for on and off boarding and management, but I'm leading so thats a good thing, I can be "This is how its done" instead of "how would you likee to handle this, [Incert directors name]

FYI, Are you going to answer your own question? I'll vote it up as its a good topic!

Well if you give me an upvote, you can answer it and I'll accept !

Ok, I'll summarise our chat and post it in a bit

Never turn down meaningless points! haha, I must be scored and hence judged by the internet!

If only twitter had a voting system, I'd never be able to escape

Don't worry, the internet is a-judging you. I gotta run off to campus (IT application dept is offsite), I'll be back in a few hours. I'll accept your answer when I see it.

Thanks again for helping out mang! Have a good day.

You too! See you on the inter-supa-highways :D