Configuring permissions

DOCman fully integrates with the Joomla's groups and permission system. In fact DOCman can be configured for any type of use-case. This article provides an introduction to the 3 aspects of permissions that you need to know:

Owner permissions (seeing & doing)

This is the simplest type of permission: an owner can both see and do things to their documents and categories. Once a user uploads a document or creates a category, they become its owner.

Owners can:

• see their documents and categories at all times
• download their documents
• edit or delete their documents and categories

Only an Administrator can change the ownership of a document or category.

Learn more about  setting up a document area for logged-in users

Access permissions (seeing)

Access permissions have to do with who gets to see what. This is done by defining which user groups have access to a document or category.

There are 3 options:

1. Inheritance: inherit access permissions from their parent
2. Groups: select one or multiple Joomla user groups
3. Presets: select one Joomla access level

Action permissions (doing)

Action permissions have to do with who can do what. There are scenarios that you want to grant or deny such permissions to users.

Examples:

• A document approval workflow where a selected group of users are allowed to upload documents, but these documents won’t get published unless a moderator approves them.
• Share document with clients where a company can share documents with their clients.
• Restrict file uploads to specific user groups where accountants in a firm can access documents from customers assigned to them.

You can find the Action permissions settings in 2 places:

1. Category form under Permissions > Actions
2. DOCman's Settings under Global permissions and Action

There are a number of actions that a user can perform on document or category such as:

• create
• edit
• delete
• download (document only)
• upload (document only)

Inheritance

The Inheritance option is also available for the action permissions. If a specific action is denied for a user group, it cannot be allowed for a child group.

An example of inheritance is making visitors see documents but not download them.

Tutorials

• Grant backend access to specific users to manage DOCman
• Setup a document area for logged in users
• Setup document approval workflow