Roles
Last updated
ProcMan Admin Guide V6.0.0
Last updated
Roles are there to group individual user and to give them certain rights in ProcMan. Often defined roles are developer, tester, admin, approver, production planner etc.
Roles also manage the set of functions which can be started by a user. Such functions are for example administration, creating a process, or starting a specific process activity. Therefore each user must be assigned to minimum one role.
The roles in ProcMan are organized hierarchically. Any role can be a root role (with no parent roles) or a child role of another role. Any role can have an arbitrary count of children roles. The role hierarchy in ProcMan can be arbitrarily deep. The semantic of the role hierarchy is, that if a user has a role assigned, he is implicitly authorized also in all ancestor roles of the assigned role, but in no descendant role of the assigned role (except that a descendant role is assigned explicitly to the user).
However, the hierarchical organization of roles needs not to be used if there is no concrete need for it. In this case all roles can be defined without parent and children.
Beware that the role names are unique in the whole ProcMan system. There cannot be defined a role with some name in one client and another role with the same name in another client. If different roles are meant then their name must be unique. If the same role is meant then the best praxis is to define it in an ancestor client of all clients where it shall be used.
There is a special role initially named ADMIN defined in the client ROOT. This role allows the users to which it is assigned to administrate ProcMan and recall/delete processes in the work list (if administrators are authorized to do this). This role cannot be deleted or disabled, but the name and/or description of this role can be changed in the roles dialog.
By clicking on the Roles menu item the role administration dialog is being started. Beware that this dialog can only administrate the roles defined in the client, in which the user is currently logged in, and in the descendant clients of this client.
After the dialog has been started, the list of already defined roles is displayed (see picture below). If there are no roles a message informing about this fact is displayed instead.
This dialog can be left by clicking the Cancel button. It can also be left at any time, even in the role definition forms for new and edited roles, by selecting another function from the ProcMan menu. If this happens in the forms the last changes done in the forms are discarded.
A new role can be defined by clicking the New button in the roles list form. After that a form with the role definition fields appears (see picture below).
After filling the fields in this form and clicking the OK button the new role is created and appears in the roles list. By clicking the Cancel button the dialog returns to the roles list without creating a new role.
In the field Client the client in which the role will be created has to be selected.
The field Name has to be filled with the name of the new role. The name of the role can contain simple alphanumerical characters (ä, š, ô, etc. are not allowed), underscores, dots and spaces. Spaces at the beginning and the end are ignored. After submitting the form the name is converted into uppercase.
In the field Parent the parent role of the new role has to be selected or it can be left empty.
The field Description can be filled with a textual description of the new role. It is a free text, which can contain any printable characters. It also can be left empty.
The check-box Process Administration, if checked, specifies that users to which the role is assigned can recall/delete processes in the work list (if administrators are authorized to do this), but they cannot administrate ProcMan (they do not even see the administration dialog menu).Though this option can be checked for any role, it is recommended not to check it for roles dedicated for creating processes and starting activities. Better praxis is to define special roles having this option checked, which allows better control of who is allowed to administrate processes.
The check-box User Administration, if checked, specifies that users to which the role is assigned have limited administrator permissions, allowing them to administrate accounts, timezone assignments and role assignments. Users having this role will have an administration dialog menu, limited to this these functions. Though this option can be checked for any role, it is recommended not to check it for roles dedicated for creating processes and starting activities. Better praxis is to define special roles having this option checked, which allows better control of who is allowed to administrate users.
The check-box Revision, if checked, enables for users to which the role is assigned a special menu item Revision – Deleted Processes. When the menu item is clicked by a user, a list of deleted processes is displayed to the user. The list is similar to the Deleted Processes tool for the administrators (described later in this documentation), except that the Delete button is missing. Though this option can be checked for any role, it is recommended not to check it for roles dedicated for creating processes and starting activities. Better praxis is to define special roles having this option checked, which allows better control of who is allowed to view the deleted processes.
The check-box Enabled specifies whether the role can be used in ProcMan or not. If a role is not enabled it behaves like if the role would not be defined at all. Moreover if a role has descendant roles and it is not enabled, the descendants are disabled as well, even if they are set to be enabled.
A role definition can be edited by selecting it in the roles list form (checking the check-box at the beginning of the table row) and clicking the Edit button in the roles list form. Alternatively a role definition can be edited also by clicking on the role name in the table of the roles list form. After that a form with the role definition fields appears. This form is the same like the form for a new role except, that the fields Client and Parent are read-only and cannot be changed.
One or more roles can be deleted by selecting them in the roles list form (checking the check-box at the beginning of the table rows) and clicking the Delete button in the roles list form. Beware that with the roles also all descendant roles are deleted. An alternative to the delete of a role is to disable it. In this case neither the role, nor its descendant roles are deleted.
Select one or more roles from the roles list form (checking the check-button at the beginning of the table rows) and click the Into Transfer Case button in the roles list form. After the selected roles have been added into the Transfer Case you can add another roles or another objects into the Transfer Case or continue with other administration work. For more information about the Transfer Case see the description of the Transfer Case tool in this document.
