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Quick Tip: Nested Controlled Access Sections

Category domino
Strictly speaking, Notes doesn't support nested controlled access sections, so this is on a "use at your own risk" basis.

Periodically I identify a need (or receive a request) to prevent editing of specific fields on a document under conditions that differ from the conditions under which the rest of the fields should be editable. Depending on the form layout and quantity of fields involved, sometimes it's just easiest to add a line under the field and insert computed text that displays the field's value, then set the field to display to editors and the text to display to non-editors. But in a more complex scenario, the "cheapest" approach is to use nested controlled access sections.

As I mentioned, Notes doesn't officially support this feature: if you highlight content that already includes a CAS (or is within one) and try to create another, the option is disabled. However... if you create a temporary form and define the new section and its content there, then copy and paste it inside of a CAS on the existing form, the edit restrictions behave precisely as one would expect: the conditions for each inner section override those of the parent section. I've used this approach in versions 4,5,6, and 7 of Notes, and so far it's always worked reliably.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Just a thought. Another alternative would be to use the input enabled property of an editable field.

The input enabled formula enables or disable the field for input. If Input Enabled evaluates to 0, data cannot be added to the field. If it evaluates to anything else, data can be added to the field.

Gravatar Image2 - Indeed... but there are a couple downsides. One is that it seems to behave differently between versions with respect to "OS-style" fields, whereas the behavior of a CAS seems fairly static by now. Another is that most of the times that I use a nested CAS the need is to have looser permissions on just a few fields within an area with tighter controls; in this scenario, it would take more time to set an input-enabled formula for each field.

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