What are Automatic Book Permissions?

Question

We found conflicting book permissions in one project involving an administrator. I inspected the history of ProjectUserAccess.xml and found this:

    <AutomaticBooks>
      <Book Id="EZR" />
    </AutomaticBooks>

How did the administrator cause this? How can we revert it? (The admin said she was looking around with Project Progress tools.) For the time being the Book Permissions window shows that two users are allowed to change EZR even if I uncheck all boxes.

Answer 1

I accidentally applied permissions to multiple books to a particular user in the Project Progress. I removed all of those permissions, but the squares are still gray in the Book permissions (last line):

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I see that all of these books are listed under <AutomaticBooks> for that user in the ProjectUserAccess.xml file. With Paratext closed, can I just remove those lines in the <AutomaticBooks> section? This is a training project, so I’m not going to damage real data…

But shouldn’t a book be removed from that list when a user doesn’t have any more permissions in that book?

Comments

Well, I figured it was worth a try, so I edited the <AutomaticBooks> sections for the different users, and now the gray boxes appear correctly, with no duplication.

But obviously I shouldn’t have to do that… What are those <AutomaticBooks> actually for, and when are they supposed to get updated? I don’t think that mechanism is working properly.

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Yes, if the permissions have been removed in Assignments and Progress then the gray box should disappear. However, it can be difficult to make sure that a user has been removed from every task/check. Also, make sure you restart Paratext and check to verify the boxes are still gray. There are times when Paratext doesn’t seem to refresh completely.

Answer 2

Permissions have gotten a little more complicated with Project Progress (and assignments). When a user is assigned a task that involves book editing in the Project Assignments, that shows up in Users, Roles and Permissions. This may appear without a check mark (the box will have a gray background to indicate it was “assigned”).

Ideally at team should make project assignments in the tasks rather than Users, Roles and Permissions, but each team will need to figure out what system works best for them.

Please note that the assignments can change so once a user completes their assigned task they may be removed from the Users, Roles and Permissions until the next task is available. Since some tasks are not “dependent” this could mean that multiple people are assigned to a book at the same time.

Answer 3

Using a project plan to assign tasks and to track the completion of those tasks is one of the big new advances in Paratext 8. If a project plan is used then editing permissions should not be controlled using the old method in the Users, Roles and Permissions window. That window is still available for those not choosing to use a project plan, and to handle issues that come up that were not included in the plan.

Answer 4

How does one stop the access to books once the assigned task and stage is completed? I think this is important so that no further changes are made after a certain stage.

Thanks

Comments

For normal “tasks”, when a task is complete, the permissions should automatically move to the next person. One place this can get confusing is if someone has been assigned a “check”. In that case, every time that error is present the person should have editing rights again. If “Juan” has been assigned to the punctuation check then Juan will have editing rights any time a punctuation error is present for any stage after where the check is started. If the check is started in the Drafting stage, but a punctuation error occurs in stage 4, then Juan should again have editing rights.

The other item to keep track of is when a task can start (as seen in the project plan settings). If you assign a task from Stage three to someone, but the task is defined as being able to start at any time, then that person will have editing rights starting with Stage one.

Answer 5

Just FYI - I was using “Assign a stage” to assign one person to all tasks/checks in each stage, so I’m pretty sure that the user had been removed from everything. (Since they were all one person, it was easy to check.) Even restarting Paratext, there are times when the gray box does not go away, and that exactly corresponded with the AutomaticBooks settings.

So I repeat: What are those <AutomaticBooks> actually for, and when are they supposed to get updated? I don’t think that mechanism is working properly.

Comments

Sometime after moving to PT9 one of our projects also had an issue with automatic permissions sticking around even after they had been removed from assignments and progress, essentially leaving them permanently assigned. We had to do what you did jeffh. I mention this just to say that if you find that this is a one time problem, it is probably from some bugs that were present previously.

jeffh, can you tell if is not updating for newly given permissions, or if it is only struggling with those that are hanging around from some past time?

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jeffh:

What are those <AutomaticBooks> actually for, and when are they supposed to get updated?

They are the permissions set based on the Project Progress assignments. That is the only thing in Paratext that manipulates them. If they are not being cleared when you have removed all tasks from a user, then that means there is probably a bug somewhere in Paratext. If it happens again, it would help to use Help > Give feedback so we can take a look.

Answer 6

Stephen+Katt:

jeffh, can you tell if is not updating for newly given permissions, or if it is only struggling with those that are hanging around from some past time?

No these were newly assigned permissions, in the last few days, with the latest version of Paratext 9.3.