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.

   

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 still see the unsaved changes you've made, but will not be able to save so as to not overwrite any new changes made to the item. To add these changes to the item, click on edit again to claim the edit lock, then make the changes.

Collaboration Groups

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

• PIs involved in collaboration can see and edit each other’s inventory items
• PIs cannot see items owned by members of other collaboration group
• members of collaboration group cannot see items owned by members of other collaboration group

This behaviour is likely to change in the future.