Access restrictions for cases, documents, and contacts

When working with WorkZone cases, documents, and contacts, you can view and edit access restrictions (that is, read and write access codes) that apply to these cases, documents, and contacts.

For more information about access restrictions, including inheritance of access restrictions from parent cases or main documents, see About access rights.

View access restrictions for a case, document, or contact

  1. Open the preview pane or a page of the needed case, document, or contact.
  2. In the Information pane, check the Read access and Write access fields.
    • No restrictions: Indicates that no access restrictions (including inherited restrictions) apply to this case, document, or contact.
    • Access restricted: Indicates that some access restrictions (including inherited restrictions) apply to this case, document, or contact.

Preview the applied access codes

  1. Open the Information pane for a case, document, or contact.
  2. Under the Read access/Write access field, click next to the Access restricted field.
    • All access codes that apply to the selected case, document, or contact will be displayed in the preview pane, grouped by their type. Access groups to which the current user belongs will be displayed in blue.
    • If there are any access restrictions that are inherited from the case (for case documents) or from the main document (for supplementary Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents), they are displayed at the top of the preview pane.
    • Click at the bottom of the preview pane to copy the applied access codes as a string value to your clipboard.
    • The button will only be displayed, if any access restrictions (including the inherited access restrictions) apply to this case, document, or contact.

Add or remove access restrictions

Prerequisite: You must have write access to the case, document, or contact that you want to edit access rights for.
  1. Open the Information pane for a case, document, or contact.
  2. In the Read access/Write access field, click Add to add an access restriction to the field, or Edit to edit the existing access resctriction.
  3. In the dialog Edit write access or Edit read access, select an organizational unit, a WorkZone user, or a term to give read or write access.
    • Click to filter on Units, Terms, or People. You can always reset the filter.
    • All access codes that apply to the selected case, document, or contact will be displayed in the preview pane, grouped by their type. Access groups to which the current user belongs will be displayed in blue.
    • If you are adding or editing access restrictions for a document, you can also select Restricted by case (for case documents) or Restricted by main document (for supplementary Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents). When this setting is selected, any access restrictions of the parent item will be applied in addition to any access restrictions that you add to the document.
    • Click at the bottom of the preview pane to copy the applied access codes as a string value to your clipboard.
  4. Click Apply.
  5. Click Save in the Information pane to save your changes.

Effective access code and inheritance of access rights

By default, all documents on a case, or supplementary documents on a main document inherit the read access of their case or main document. Contacts do not have access right inheritance as there is no default hierarchical structure for contacts to base inheritance on.

When a document or a case inherits an access restriction from a parent case or a main document, the access restriction is combined with any access restrictions that are added specifically to the case or document. This combination of inherited access restrictions and specifically added restrictions is called the effective access code. The effective access code is expressed as follows:

[The case access restriction]

& [The main document/document access restriction]

& [The child item access restriction]

For example, the effective read access on a document detail page could be[ ] & [ ] & [ ]:

[the document's own read access] & [the main document's read access] & [the case's read access]

By default, all documents inherit the read access of the case, unless it is specifically changed for some of the documents.

Example: Example of inheritance
  • A case document is covered by the read permissions that are defined for the case AND the case document.
  • A child item can be covered by the read permissions that are defined for the case AND the main document AND the child item itself.
A document created on a case, where read access is given to the group "PERS", but where no specific read permissions are defined for the document itself, has the effective read access:
[ ] & [ ] & [PERS]
You can restrict the read access to the document itself. For example, you can define that the users BB and AA will have read access to the document only if they are also members of the group "PERS". You do this by adding the following to the read access of the document:
[BB|AA] & [ ] & [PERS]
If the inheritance of the read access of the case is removed from the document, the effective read access will be [BB|AA].