Wish: More granular control of editing permissions for users

[Insider0203]

Currently, there are 3 levels of permission for editing data in Bandhelper: All data, edited data, none.

These are simple but might not be flexible enough for some users.

For example, I'm currently in a situation where we have a fill-in singer. Our main singers have most of their lyrics memorized and consequently, most songs in our repertoire don't have lyrics added. For this fill-in singer, they will require lyrics. It would be great if the admin could allow users to select which fields are editable. In this case, I would only allow this singer to be able to edit lyrics in songs and nothing else.

Other things that could be selectable could be documents, midi presets, notes, song names and other important meta data fields, set lists, smart lists, etc

[arlo]

Your fill-in singer could turn on Settings > Account Sync > Personal Sync > Lyrics and then they can add their own lyrics. Nobody else will see those personal lyrics, but you could copy them from the personal field to the shared field later.

I'm surprised a fill-in singer would be willing to populate your account with lyrics. I would expect the band leader or maybe the regular singers to do this, and then it would be available for the fill-ins, making it easier for them to practice the material.

[Insider0203]

That's true. I've thought about it more and I think the main concern (and I think most people would share this) is that the administrator doesn't generally want anyone deleting any data, like whole songs or setlists.

So I'm the administrator, but not a singer. I'd like to be able to let the singers add lyrics to all the existing songs in the data base but not have the ability to delete anything. I think that's a generally useful feature; edit metadata but not the main data. It'd be analogous to a shared Google sheet where the file owner can select which cells in a spreadsheet are editable to which users.

[Insider0203]

I actually just realized that's more or less how the "added data" setting works; users can "add" meta data, but not delete any data entirely.

You also mentioned the personal sync options. The way this works is that each user goes into their individual settings and can turn on what things they want to sync to only their devices, correct? So if a user turns personal lyrics on, only that user will see the lyrics they add?

Would it not make more sense to have the administrator be able to set those options rather than from the other users profile?

[arlo]

I think a field-by-field permission structure would be too confusing or annoying. First, there are a lot of fields, so that would be a lot of settings. Second, I anticipate a lot of questions like "why can I edit the key but not the tempo" or a lot of messing around to enable one field, then go back and enable another, etc. It just doesn't seem worth it.

Sometimes people ask for a permission that lets users edit but not delete. But there are many ways to mess up the data other than deleting it. None of those are likely to happen, so again, it doesn't seem worth it to make the permissions more complicated. If I could think of a way to add this while making the permissions more intuitive, that would be worth it. Meanwhile, if someone does delete something, or make an unwanted edit, you can undo those actions from the Admin > History page.

The "Added Data" permission means users can edit or delete items they create. For example, if a user adds a set list, they can edit or delete that set list, but they can't edit or delete set lists they didn't add.

Personal Sync means users can add their own versions of various fields, like Lyrics or Color. These are literally meant to be personal, so I think it makes sense for users to control it themselves rather than having an administrator control it. Users with the Added Data permission can edit their own personal fields for any item regardless of who added it. For example, an Added Data user who turns on Personal Notes can add personal notes to a song you added, but can't edit the other song fields or delete the song.