Users and Groups

Whenever a user is created, via the preferences dialog from within the program, the new user is automatically given membership of the everybody group, and membership of their own private group created with the same name.

So, for example, if a username "fred" is created, the softorganiser program does the following things:

  • it creates a user in the user table called fred.

  • it creates a group in the workgroup table called fred

  • it then creates 2 entries in the workgroup_member table:

    • an entry to say that the fred user is a member of the fred group

    • another entry to say that fred is also a member of the everybody group

This is all done by simply typing a new username into the preferences dialog (available from the edit menu).

Creating extra groups

Any further administration work, such as creating another group called "sales" and adding users to it, will need to be done by a separately written administration program (not intended to be written at this stage), or by a database management program that can work with the format of the database being used.

If you want to create a group called, say, office, and another one called factory, you'd have to use another program to edit the database directly to do that. At this stage, unless someone wants to sponsor me to do it :), I won't be writing an administrator program that can manage the users and group creation and membership.

Assuming you're using the Access 97 database that came with the Windows version of this SoftOrganiser, all you do is open this database from within Access 97. Note that I haven't tried this with Access 2000… apparently it overwrites files with a newer version and may render the database file unreadable by the current ODBC control panel. If you really need to use Access 2000 to do this, you may need to update your ODBC drivers… I'm not sure about this.

If you have Access 97 installed, double-click the database file to open it. For the above example of factory and office groups, you'd open the workgroup table and create the new office and factory workgroups. Close that table and then open the workgroup_member table and create an entry for the appropriate users in the new workgroup. All you have to do is click on the very bottom record and pull down the workgroup_id list. Then pull down the list to the right of that and pull down the user_id list and select the user that you want to make a member of the group on the left. The next time the program runs, it will check what groups the currently logged on user is a member of, and it will display all contacts and schedules (or alarms) belonging to any of those groups.

The first screen dump below is the workgroup_member table shown in Access 97.

 The second screen dump shows how the program will then let you choose any of these groups (that the current user is a member of) as an owner for a contact or schedule.