Don’t Ignore That Little Green Flag

There is a setting on the workflow states in EPDM that is easy to overlook but can drive you nuts while troubleshooting. That setting is “Ignore permissions in previous states.” In 2011, it is the green flag icon on the State Box. (Previously the icon was a hand.)

Why this setting can be troublesome.
If this flag is not set there will be circumstances where permissions set at a particular state are not followed.  This particularly happens when a permission was granted at an earlier state but removed at a later state.  Let’s go through an example. I’m going to use a simple workflow and explain what happens with “Read file contents” for two groups.

Scenario 1:
The “Ignore permissions in previous states” flag is NOT selected for any state.

Permission: Can “Read file contents”

With this setup someone in Sales should be able to see any file that is in the Released state but not in any other state.

A document was added to the vault and is currently in the Initiated State.

This is what an Engineering user sees:               This is what a Sales user sees:

So far everything is as expected.

Change State was initiated on the document and it was sent to the Released State.

This is what an Engineering user sees:                 This is what a Sales user sees:

At this point, this is what we planned with our workflow.

Now, though, let’s Change State on the document again and send it to the Under Editing State.

This is what an Engineering user sees:                 This is what a Sales user sees:

Wait a minute! The Sales user is NOT supposed to see files in Under Editing. So what’s going on?

It has to do with that little green flag. Because we did not set the “Ignore permissions in previous states”, the Sales user can see the file when it is Under Editing because they were able to see it in the previous Released state.

Scenario 2:

Let’s try this again with a new file but this time we’ll set the “Ignore permissions” flag in all states.

This is what an Engineering user sees:                 This is what a Sales user sees:

Change state to Released.
This is what an Engineering user sees:                  This is what a Sales user sees:

OK, so far, so good.

Change state to Under Editing.
This is what an Engineering user sees:                  This is what a Sales user sees:

This time, this is exactly what we wanted to happen.

By turning on the “Ignore permissions in previous states” flag, the permissions set for each state were followed exactly as we set them.  So don’t ignore that little green flag!