Access Security

[statsman]

OK - I have just completed my first Access database for network use. It will be placed on the network presently. I have split it into front end and back end and everything seems to be working fine.

The database contains five major areas. Each has tables, forms, queries, macros and reports. There will be seven user groups. Some have access to everything, some have access to almost everything with read only in the remaining areas and some have read only to some and no access to the rest. My question:
If I wish to give full access to an area, do I have to go through everything in that area (table, forms, queries, macros and reports) to give access or is there an easier way.

If I'm being obtuse, please reccommend come reading.

 

[KenHigg]

Yes, that's the drill... But it's not that bad, I think you can select everything in an object type group and assign rights to them all in one pass
...

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Unfortunately, the Windows paradigm for user groups is butt-backwards for everything. The problem is that individual objects can have different group permissions and individual users can be members of multiple groups.

I'm going to assume that you use "area" to represent an "area of interest" within the application, which implies that it is an overarching application with many such areas. I guess it is somewhat like a business model where the areas could be accounts receiveable, accounts payable, inventory, personnel, payroll, shipments in, etc. That kind of "area."

The best way to create a new "area" is to define a couple of groups, perhaps one to which you will allow full access and another with more limited access. Visit every object and add the new groups to the area members with all permissions as appropriate. Then, of course, you would add users to the appropriate groups - or more technically correct, you would tack the group code on each user. In Access, the GUI is the only real way to do this that doesn't require lots of programming and more than a little ingenuity.

Unless you have a programmatic way to recognize that object X is in area Y (whereas object X1 is not...). In which case you could write some VBA code to add a group to the objects in the area. If this is even possible, you would have some pretty ugly code to traverse the various collections such as Tables, Queries, Forms, Reports, etc. and apply your selection filter to decide whether to add a new group name to the object.

 

[statsman]

Thanks guys. I apreciate your input.