Updating access

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1

Hi,

I think this is going to be obvious to someone, but I have been struggling with this for a bit. I have a classic app. in this i have a table of sites. Each site has 3 levels of manager associated. Previously i used this to control the access to the that site. However as i need to be able to give access to the site to other people i added an additional field for who can access. This works well, however the issue i have is that when i update the manager i would like to update the access by automatically (even if it just adds the new manager and leaves the old one). As the first 3 fields are linked to the specific level of user role and the access i by is linked to the accounts I cant find a way to do this automatically.

Has anyone found a way to do this? I feel like it may be where flows come in, but i haven’t spent much time with flows (have 0 in the app currently).

Any advice appreciated

2

Hi @Chris8, do you mean something like the below, where the Access field should merge the Manager L1-3 fields?:

Manager L1 Manager L2 Manager L3 Access
Alex Chen Brooke Smith George King Alex Chen, Brooke Smith, George King

Your Knack Flow/Make/Zapier scenario might look something like this:

  1. Listen for ‘edit site’ form being submitted
  2. Merge ID values from Manager L1, Manager L2, Manager L3 into an array:
    ["123abc","456def","789ghi"]
  3. Update Access field record with new array value

Alternatively, you could use JavaScript and the Knack API Helper library (see guide here) to do something similar on a form-submit handler:

$(document).on('knack-form-submit.any', function(event, view, record) {
  
  if (view.key === 'view_aa') { // Edit site form
    const accessAccounts = [
      record?.field_aa?.[0]?.id, // Manager L1
      record?.field_bb?.[0]?.id, // Manager L2
      record?.field_cc_raw?.[0]?.id // Manager L3
    ].filter(Boolean)
    const body = { field_dd: accessAccounts }; // Access
    KnackAPI.makeRequest('put', { 
      scene: 'scene_bb', // A hidden page with same role permissions as Edit site
      view: 'view_bb', // An edit site form view within this hidden page (should contain field_dd)
      recordId: record.id,
      body
    });
  }

});

Let me know if you go down any of these routes!

3

Hi,

Thanks for this. When I try to do it, it seems to give me issues as each of the 3 fields is connected to a user role (l1, l2, l3), where as the ‘access by’ is connected to the ‘accounts’ table. Additionally the ‘access by’ field may contain other users, so I cant simply overwrite the data, i need to try and include the current data and simply add the new data. I tried to do it with JavaScript but kept hitting issues. I gave up after a bit, as it occurred that it may be better to try flows, but maybe i need to have another look at using javascript. This is where I got to:

$(document).on('knack-record-update.view_234', function(event, view, record) {
  const getIds = (fieldData) => {
    if (!fieldData) return [];
    return Array.isArray(fieldData) ? fieldData.map(item => item.id) : [fieldData.id];
  };

  // Gather IDs from the record just updated
  const existingIds = getIds(record.field_732);
  const idsFrom439 = getIds(record.field_439);
  const idsFrom165 = getIds(record.field_165);
  const idsFrom164 = getIds(record.field_164);

  // Merge and Remove Duplicates
  const combined = [...existingIds, ...idsFrom439, ...idsFrom165, ...idsFrom164];
  const uniqueIds = [...new Set(combined)].filter(id => id);

  // Prepare the data for the PUT request
  const updateData = {
    field_732: uniqueIds
  };

  // Execute the call
  $.ajax({
    url: `https://api.knack.com/v1/objects/object_1/records/${record.id}`,
    type: 'PUT',
    headers: {
      'Authorization': Knack.getUserToken(),
      'X-Knack-Application-Id': Knack.application_id,
      'Content-Type': 'application/json'
    },
    data: JSON.stringify(updateData),
    success: function(response) {
      console.log('Master field updated successfully:', response);
    },
    error: function(error) {
      console.error('Error updating master field:', error);
    }
  });
});

However I think I need to amend to using a form to update as opposed to updating the object as I think there is a permission error when getting the user token.

4

@Chris8

  • Your code makes sense given there may be other users in that field, so no problems there
  • You cannot use a user token for an object-based request, so you are best to use view-based instead, as you mentioned
  • Pointing to different user role records rather than all to the accounts table is going to be problematic, it’s not too late to restructure that if you can - Callum Boase has an extensive video on this here: Why I never add fields to child user roles in Knack
  • With the above point, you are going to run into similar trouble if you go down the Flows route