Group Assignment Actions
The Group Assignment action grants access to certain users who belong to a certain "group" Resource within your project. A Group can be defined as a separate Resource that is then assigned to different users, thereby placing those users into different permission contexts. In order to establish a permission system based on these groups, follow the Walkthrough guide below.
Settings
Group Resource: The Select Resource field on your form that maps to the Group Resource.
User Resource: The Select Resource field on your form that maps to the User Resource. Users will join the selected Group upon submission.
User Role: The Select Resource field on your form that maps to the Role Resource. Users will carry the User Role that was selected upon submission
Walkthrough
Click here for more information on Group Assignments workflows
Group Permissions
In addition to providing access based on Roles within a project, you can also grant access to certain users who belong to a certain "group". A Group can be defined as a separate Resource that is then assigned to users, thereby placing those users into different contexts. In order to establish a permission system based on these groups, we must first setup our project to enable Group structure. We will start by creating a Group resource.
Create a Group Resource
In order to take advantage of the group permission system, you must first create a "group" resource. A group can really be defined as any entity that is used to coalesce different sets of users into different groups. Here are some good examples of what would be defined as a Group.
Department - Used to place employees in their own departments.
Team - Could be used to place athletes into their teams.
Class - Could be used for education to collect teachers and students together into a "class" group.
For this generic example, however, we will just call our group "Group" which can be done by creating a new resource, and we will just add a single Text Field called "Name".
Once this group is created, we can now create a few example groups by simply using this resource and submitting a few records. We will just create two new groups called, "Teachers" and "Students"
We can now create our "join" resource to bring users and groups together.
Creating a Join Resource
To create a many-to-many relationship between Users and Groups (where users can be associated with many groups, and vice-versa) we will create another Resource that will serve the sole purpose of "joining" these two resources together. This is typically called a Join Resource and is very powerful in establishing a many-to-many relationship between two resources.
A one-to-many relationship is also possible by simply adding the "Group" resource as a field that belongs on the User resource, but for this example, we will cover the more common use case of using a join resource.
To create this Join Resource, we will do the following.
Create a new Resource and call it UserGroup
Drag and drop a Select component
Give the component a label of User
Click on Data tab, and then select Resource under Data Source Type.
Next, select User as the resource.
Scroll down and then type the following for Item Template.
<span>{{ item.data.email }}</span>Press Save to save the field on the form.
Repeat steps 2 - 7, but this time do it for the Group resource. Make the Item Template as
<span>{{ item.data.name }}</span>
Now save this resource.
Next, you will click on the Actions tab for this resource, add a new Action called Group Assignment and then click on Add Action button. Under the action settings, for Group Resource, select Group and for the User Resource, select User.
Next click Save Action to add this action to the form.
We can now create a few submissions in this resource (by clicking the Use tab) so that we can associate some users with some groups. Here is an example of the submission data after we have done this.
Assigning Group Permissions
The next thing we need to do is to add a Group to a form (as a field), and then provide access to that form based on the group that the user belongs to. For example, we could create an Evaluation form, and then add the following Group as a field to that form.
Now that you have the field added to your form, we can now edit the Access tab and configure the following under the Field Based Resource Access section.
This configuration basically says the following.
Any students who create evaluations can read other students evaluations, but not teachers evaluations. Any teachers who create evaluations can read other teachers evaluations, but not student evaluations.
This is how you can enable groups of users to have different access than other groups of users based on their associations with other resources within a Form.io project.
Group permissions function by assigning the Group ID (submission id) as a "role" that is added to the user's submission object. This can be seen by viewing the user's submission JSON and viewing the "roles" property which will contain any group IDs that the user has been assigned.
Group Roles
In addition to allowing Groups to be established, it is also possible to establish roles, where further categorization of users can be made within a single group. For example, if you wish to have a Group defined as a Classroom, the Group Roles system allows you to assign users to a Classroom, but then choose if they are a Teacher or a Student within that classroom, and then grant separate permissions based on their role within the Group.
This is configured exactly as you would configure the Group Permissions above, but with just a few differences.
When you create your Join Resource, you will need to create a field that will be used to establish the "Roles" within that group. This can simply be a Select dropdown with the Values of that select dropdown showing the roles you wish to provide.
When you configure the Group Assignment action, you will now want to select this new field as the Role.
Finally, when you assign the permissions of the Group to the form, you will want to assign which role within the form can have which permission.
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