Unified Access Rights

In Alfabet 11 versions, configuration of appearance, availability and access permissions for object class properties and button interaction has been moved to the class model and class settings.

The unified access permissions include the following:

• The role of view schemes has been reduced to be a collection of class settings. The Configure user profile functionality has been removed. Access permissions and changes to captions and hints can be set on the level of both object classes and class settings. The role of the view scheme configuration has been reduced to define the class settings for a user profile.
• Object class property attributes can be changed in the class settings. For each object class property, attributes like caption, hint, and access permissions for users can be overwritten via the class settings.
• Object class property groups are independent from object profiles.: Object class property groups formerly configured as part of an object view are now configured as an own configuration object, independent from single views or object classes. The property group as such is empty. The property group can therefore be re-used for multiple object classes and display different object class properties for each of the object classes. In the class model, the object class properties are assigned to one of the available property groups. A property group added to a class based content area will display the object class properties of the current obejct class assigned to it.

  In the class settings, the assignment of object class properties to object class property groups can be overwritten.

• Button availability and appearance is configurable directly in Alfabet Expand. In Alfabet 11 versions, the availability of buttons for standard views can be edited directly in Alfabet Expand in the new Presentation Objects section of the Presentation tab.

  The buttons for content areas and data workbenches are defined in the class model in a folder Generic Operations for each object class. The operations in the class model are private and cannot be changed. In the class settings, the availability and basic attributes of these buttons, like caption and hint, can be changed.

  This feature is not fully implemented with Alfabet 11.5. In the class model, buttons are only available as generic operations for the object classes:

  • Application
  • Component
  • Local Component
  • Information Flow

  In the transition phase, the buttons defined via the object profile specified in the class settings is used for display of buttons for operations not yet available in the class model. For class based content areas, buttons from an object profile can also be added by assigning the object profile to the content area.

• Enumeration items can be renamed and a button and color scheme can be applied. This feature is also available for object state values which are no longer handled via the XML object ObjectStateManager but via the ObjectState enumeration.

The new way to handle object class accessibility on the user interface offers a number of advantages:

• Less configuration effort. The accessibility of object class properties and buttons as well as the assignment to property groups need to be specified only once for the user profile. The configuration of all other parts of the user profile, like content area and data workbench ocnfiguration is automatically adapted to the central configuration.
• Higher consistency. Centralized access permissions ensure that editability and look and feel is consistent throughout all views in a user profile.
• Higher configuration flexibility. Configuration of accessibility is done per object class property. You can now exclude single object class properties from inline editing. You can also limit a reference to an object class to be truely available for an object class stereotype only. You can rename the object class property storing the relation as well as the button interactions to display the object class stereotype name.