FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Extended Privileges

Extended privileges come in two flavors. There’s a set of default extended privileges that lets you determine how your users interact with shared databases. These privileges control how your database works with other FileMaker products (primarily FileMaker Server) so they’re covered in Chapter 18. You can also create custom extended privileges of your own. Each extended privilege can be turned on or off for each privilege set you define.

These custom extended privileges don’t actually add any capability on their own. Instead, using scripts, you can check to see whether the active privilege set has an extended privilege before you let the user do anything important or irreversible. To use this feature fully, write your scripts with extended privileges in mind. Then, when you need to temporarily give extra power to a particular privilege set, you just turn on a checkbox in the Edit Privilege Set window and all your scripts do the right thing. The next section takes you through one example.

Creating an Extended Privilege

Suppose you’ve decided to let project managers delete records directly, and you give them that power in their privilege set. When other people try to delete a customer record, you want FileMaker to flag the record instead, so that a manager can find and delete the flagged records later. To automate the process, you write a Delete script, using the Get ( PrivilegeSetName ) function to check whether the person’s a manager before deleting the records. ...