Edit Item Responsibility Groups
The Item responsibility groups are used to limit a user's access to specific Items, occurrences of Items or Products (here called Item-related objects). By assigning a responsibility group to an Item-related object, you can limit who can just see an object at both the Type and Occurrence Levels and who can update it.
Setting up Responsibility groups
To use, first create the responsibility group you want to limit your item-related object to. This is done in Settings in the client (under Project and database administration → Settings → Items → Responsibility groups. Add the new (see below).
Here you can add your new Responsibility. Please note that the abbreviated version ("Responsibility") is displayed a number of places, so it is a good idea to choose a short name here if possible.
In the edit panel, you can also choose to add status tags to the responsibility. This is something you do if you want users to pass item-related objects between them, for example when you want to have an acceptance status set to control who accepts and updates objects at a certain stage in their life-cycle (more about this in Restricting Access by Status).
Adding a Responsibilities to an Item and Occurrences
Responsibility is typically assigned to Items but when required additional alternative Responsibility values can be assigned to individual Occurrences of Items.
This may be of use where a particular Occurrence of an Item passes from one Responsibility to another for a particular Instance.
In the example below the Water dispenser has 3 Occurrences in the Gymnasium but we want one of the Occurrences to be editable by a user with Hydraulic Engineer Responsibility. The Occurrence is selected and the Responsibility changed in the Occurrences Property Panel:
In general, once the Responsibility Groups have been set up, you can add any Responsibility Group you have access to, to any Item you have edit access to.
In the figure below, the user has limited responsibility to EPLAN only. Therefore, the user can update (or create or delete) an Occurrence of an item with responsibility EPLAN, but cannot change the responsibility to ARC, for example.
Restricting user access
Restricting which users should have what responsibility, is done in the Web admin interface (see under "modify item rights for a user"). If what you want to do is to restrict the user to only create and update some objects - for example, only occurrences tagged with "EPLAN" - we advice giving the user 3-read as the overall access, and upgrad to 2 - Limited on the responsibility group EPLAN. This will give the user the ability to see other items on the room, for example, limiting the possibility of creating duplicates because one cannot see what is in the database.
If the user is given "4 - None" as general access, and "2-limited" on EPLAN, the user will not be able to see occurrences or products that have responsibility "EPLAN" but belong to an item with another responsibility such as "ARC".
If you want to give the user (me) the possibility to create new occurrences (chairs in the living room) of an item (chair), but not change or delete the occurrences of those items already put there by someone else (chairs in the kitchen):
Create three different responsibility groups. Example: EPLAN (My main responsibility), ARC1 (the objects I should not be able to add/change) and ARC2 (the items I should be able to create an occurrence of)
Give the existing occurrences (chairs in the kitchen) the responsibility ARC1
Give the item (Chair specification) the responsiblity ARC2
Give me the responsibilities ARC2 and EPLAN. If I can update the living room (at least permission 2-limited on rooms), I can now select the Chair item and press "add to room" go get a new occurrence of the chair in the living room. If I then want to keep on working on this chair in my EPLAN responsibility role, perhaps sharing it with other equipment planners who cannot create new occurrences (do not have ARC2 responsibility), I must remember to change the responsibility on the chair(s) in the living room to EPLAN.