Overview of access to data (Administration)
Learn about the data access and restrictions in Phocas, which as an administrator, you are responsible for managing.
When users are added to Phocas, they automatically see a homepage but cannot view any data until they are given access to a Phocas database. Even when users have access to a database, they might not be able to access all of the data within that database.
To ensure users only see the data that is relevant to them (and protect sensitive information), administrators can:
Control whether or not users have access to a database.
Use restrictions to limit what users can see (specific data items) within each database.
For example, you might want all users to be able to access the Sales database but only allow some users to see a subset of the data, such as a specific region or customer.
Two types of database restrictions
When you give users access to a database, by default, they have access to all data items (streams, measures and dimensions) in that database, unless default database restrictions apply. You can apply additional restrictions on a user-by-user basis.
User database restrictions: Applicable to one or more selected users, to limit access. If a user does NOT have a restriction, it implies they have access to all data items in the database.
Default database restrictions: Applicable to all users for whom NO user restrictions were applied. Used to increase access; allows a secure by default way of setting up a database.
These restrictions work together to give administrators a very fine level of control over data visibility, with the user restriction always overriding any default database restriction.
You apply restrictions to one database at a time, therefore, a restriction in one database has no influence on the other databases to which the user has access. This means that:
You can define separate restrictions for different databases. For example, you might want to give a user access to the Cost data in the Purchases database but not in the Sales database.
If you want to apply the same restriction to multiple databases, you need to define the restriction for each database. For example, you might want to restrict access to the Cost data in both the Purchases and Sales databases.
Managing database access and restrictions
You can give a user access to a database and apply restrictions in different ways. Each method approaches the task from a different point of view, so one might be more suitable than another:
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