How to lock editing of a book

Question

I’m wondering what is the best way to lock a book and ensure that it isn’t edited. In trying to do this, I’ve encountered a number of problems that I can’t seem to overcome.

I have been using Assignments and Progress to handle book permissions. Now we have finished a book and have begun typesetting it, so I want to lock down the book and make sure that no one (including myself) make any changes. If I were using manual permission, I could just untick all permissions. But the Assignments and Progress is still showing the blue box for one of the translators, indicating that Assignments and Progress is granting permissions for this book. However, all previous stages have already been marked as complete, and this translator does not have any assigned stages in the current (and last) stage. So I wouldn’t expect them to have these inherited permissions, but they do. Perhaps this is happening because of one of the Basic Checks style tasks, even though I can’t see their name assigned to any of these? I’m sure I may be missing something here, but if it is happening to me, I’m sure others will have the same issue, and I’m wondering what the best workaround is.

Also, I’m confused by the ‘Assign Stage’ button in the All Tasks view. If all tasks in the stage are unassigned, this button does nothing, no matter who I choose to assign it to. The only time it seems to function is when there is already one or more tasks assigned to a person, and then I change it to a different person, it can overwrite those users, but only for the tasks that already have an assigned user, and not for other unassigned tasks. So I can’t seem to actually assign all unassigned tasks to a specific user. Furthermore, I cannot choose “Unassigned” for the entire stage for the purposes of removing all permissions in the book, because selecting it does nothing.

So I have a few questions:

• Is there some way to completely lock a book to editing? If not, should there be a way to do this, especially considering that Assignments and Progress can give permissions in ways that are a bit difficult to diagnose or remove? My personal preference would be an override button in the User Permission window that locks a book and can override permissions given by Assignments and Progress.
• Is the Assign Stage button working properly? When I click Assign Stage and choose a user, shouldn’t it assign every task in that stage to the selected user? Mine does not do that (bug?). Is there a better way to clear all permissions from a book? I would prefer to leave completed assignments so that I can see who completed those tasks originally, but I’m not sure how else to handle this.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Hello Esteban.
As far as I know if there are no user permissions checked and there are no pending assignments, the chapter/book cannot be edited by the user.
You can look at the following to confirm what Paratext is understanding.
Open book permissions (Project menu->Project settings->User permissions->Book permissions button.

You will have a box like this.

Only if there is a blue shadow, it means that Paratext is finding a permission due to an active assignment in “Assignments and progress”.
On the contrary, if there is a check or a number it means that you have been granted permission directly there. The check means permission on the whole book, and the number means permission on that number of chapters.

If the book you need to confirm is blank for all users it should not be editable. If any of them have blue permissions, you should check the Assignments to see which task (however small) is still active. It may even be a check or a postponed assignment such as unconfirmed words from the Word or Vocabulary List, etc.

Answer 2

I would second this need.

Blessings,

Answer 3

Another technician and I were looking at an issue of this type this morning and could not find any place where a task or check was assigned to the user or team. This was a project that had been backed up and restored and we think that the user permissions some how got carried over.
It was possible for us to go into the ProjectUserAccess.xml file and look for the section of <AutomaticBooks> for that user and delete those manually.
BE VERY CAREFUL DOING ANY MANUAL EDITING OUTSIDE OF PARATEXT