Tutorial 8 | The Admin Menu

Add a New User

When you create a database, you are the only user (other than Heurist designer Dr Ian Johsnon, who is added automatically to every database to provide support). To add more users, go to the ‘Users’ tool in the ‘Admin’ menu. It is good practice to give each user of the database their own account, rather than sharing a login. To add a new user, simply click ‘+ Add new user’ at the top right of the screen:

This will bring up the ‘Add User’ menu. For new users, do make sure to include a password. New users will recieve an email from Heurist providing them a link to the database and also their username and password.

Managing Workgroups

All users should be assigned to ‘workgroups’ in the database. Workgroups are an essential part of Heurist’s ‘permissions’ system. When you add or edit records in the database, you can choose which workgroups are able to view or edit records. Some sensitive or important records (e.g. the project website) may only be editable by Database Adminstrators. Other records may be editable by any user, or just by research assistants. To define such permissions, you first need to assign your users to different workgroups. In the ‘Users’ tool, you can change a particular user’s workgroup membership by clicking on the grey membership icon in the membership column:

While it is possible to add or edit workgroups from the previous screen, you can also gain an overview of all the workgroups in your database from the ‘Workgroups’ tool. You can create a new workgroup by clicking ‘+ Add new group’ in the top right. In the below example, I create a specific workgroup for ‘Research Assistants’.

Managing user permissions

We will cover this in more detail in a later tutorial. For now, I will just direct you to a few of the ways that you can manage users’ permissions in Heurist. In Heurist, user’s permissions are recorded seperately for each record in the database. Each particular record is ‘owned’ by a particular individual or workgroup, can be edited by a particuar individual or workgroup, and can be viewed by particular individuals, by particuar workgroups, or by the public. You can set the permissions for a new record by clicking ‘permission settings’ in the new record pane:

In the ‘Record addition settings’ popup, you can choose who is able to view or edit a particular record. Click ‘Add record’ to create one record with you chosen settings, or click ‘Save settings’ to make your chosen settings the default for all new records.

You can easily alter the permissions for existing records using the ‘Share’ tool in the ‘Explore’ menu. This allows you to change the permissions for selected records, or for all the records in the resultset for your current filter (see Tutorial 4).