In many projects, it is important to distinguish the active user, mainly for the mobile client. Mostly, it is required to just restrict access to certain users. Often, there are also different groups of users that should have different rights to view, edit, create or delete objects. In some cases, the content provided to the mobile client should depend on the active user. This How-To explains how to configure users and how to customize a UBIK® application depending on the active user.
Managing user accounts
The first step in any case is to create and organize accounts for users. In some case, users have to be imported from an external system, which is best done using Proxies (see also how to Configure Proxies). However, accounts can also be created manually or programmatically. In any case, the following information is relevant.
Login
In UBIK®, an account object is called Login, with the system MetaClass LOGIN. Theoretically, a user can have multiple such login credentials, but normally, you'd have one per user. If there are multiple logins for one user, you can create a custom meta class for the users and link the login objects to them via Relation or Reference (see also how to Relate Objects). You can also create a derivation of the LOGIN system meta class to add further details for the instances.
User groups
Login accounts are best managed in groups corresponding to roles, e.g., "Administrator" or "Engineer". This is important if you don't want to distinguish by account individually, but more generally by their role. This allows you to add new logins (to existing groups) without having to adapt your customizing. There is a system meta class USERGROUP that can be used for this. Similar to the way you would link multiple logins to a user, you can also relate multiple users to one or many groups (there is a system relation for that, SYSREL_GROUP_LOGIN).
If you have just one group of users (i.e., all the users have the same rights or highly individual rights), it is not necessary to configure groups.