Permissions and Sharing in Inventory 🧪

Introduction

Inventory currently supports an 'Open Lab' sharing setup within user's LabGroup(s). We are planning to develop more sharing options in the future.

The current permissions and sharing rules are:

• All Inventory items belonging to LabGroup members are visible to everyone in the LabGroup
• Items can be edited, moved, and deleted by anyone in the LabGroup
• You can transfer your own items to another user, who can be anyone in the system. PIs and LabAdmins can transfer items of other members of their LabGroup
• Access within CollaborationGroups is limited to PIs and their items

More details on sharing and permissions functionality are presented in the the following sections.

Detailed Permissions

Anyone can:

• view/edit/transfer owned inventory items
• view items inside owned containers
• view a container that stores owned items
• view/copy default templates

Group member can:

• view/edit inventory items owned by members of their group

Group’s PI/Lab Admin can:

• view/edit/transfer inventory items owned by members of their group

Community Admin can:

• view items owned by members of their community

System Admin can:

• view everyone’s items

View items owned by a specific user

You can restrict searches to show items owned by a specific user by clicking 'Owner' dropdown under search menu, and selecting the user. The list that appears contains users whose items you can see, e.g. members of your LabGroup.

Filter by items you own

Items you own will have the default 'info' icon. If the item is not owned by you, the icon will display as a 'people' icon to indicate that this is an item shared with you.

You can filter for items which you own by clicking on the 'owner' drop down and choosing the username listed under 'me'

Transfer Ownership

Transferring ownership of an item to another user gives the new owner full control over the item. Only the current owner of an item, or a PI/LabAdmin of the LabGroup can transfer ownership of an item. The recipient of the transfer can be any other RSpace user.

1. Click on Transfer on an item

   

2. Select a user to transfer the item to. You can use the dropdown to choose from the list of users in your LabGroup, or start typing a name or username of a user in the wider system, then select from the autocomplete options.

   

3. Click on Transfer to confirm the transfer.

   

4. You will get a success notification. Note that if you are transferring to a user outside of your LabGroup, this will trigger a notification about the item not being viewable anymore.

   

5. Note: if you are transferring items located on your bench, they will be moved to the recipient's bench (and therefore will not be visible on yours any longer). You can search a bench by owner to view those items again.

Editing Shared Item - Edit Locks

An edit-lock system prevents users from accidentally modifying the same item simultaneously. When you start editing an item, other users will not be able to edit the item. The edit lock is released once you stop editing, by either saving, cancelling, or timing out.

To prevent items from being locked for a long period of time, the edit lock times out after 5 minutes of inactivity. If you're currently editing, you will get a warning after 4 minutes of inactivity that your editing session is about to expire, and you can choose to renew the lock.

If you do not renew the lock, the lock will expire and another user will be able to edit the item.

If you lose the lock, you will not be able to save so as to not overwrite any new changes made to the item. However, you will still be able to see the unsaved changes you've made. If you wish to add those changes to the item, you will have to do so manually. We recommend navigating to the item in a new browser tab, clicking on edit again to claim the lock, then copy-pasting any content you wish to keep from one tab to the other.

Collaboration Groups

Inventory 'Open Lab' permissions rules currently apply to standard LabGroups, not to Collaboration Groups. The access to items between members of Collaboration Groups is currently limited to PI users:

• PIs involved in collaboration can see and edit inventory items of other PIs involved in collaboration
• PIs don't gain any new permissions to see items owned by members of the collaboration group (but they're still able to see items belonging to members of their own LabGroup)
• members of the collaboration group don't gain any new permissions to see items owned by other members of the collaboration group (but they're still able to see items belonging to members of their own LabGroup)

This behaviour is likely to change as we expand sharing capabilities.