Current Issue - I created a category hierarchy and populated it with documents/articles. Its a big hierarchy now, and users/groups are using it. Now I want to give access to a new user group. Ideally I should be able to set that permission at parent folder and it should automatically get applied to all its children. But that does not happen, I have to go every sub-category and document in hierarchy and give that permission individually. Very frustrating!!! Users and groups change with time. This should be a basic feature.

I defined the feature for you ...

As a, Admin user

I want to, update the access level permissions for a category to add/remove one or more user/group

So that, I can give/remove access permission to a category and all its children in the hierarchy

Example category hierarchy - A > B > C > D

Access level changes should be applied only to the children in hierarchy, not parent

If user updates access level for category A, then the same change should get applied to sub-categories B/C/D and all the documents under A/B/C/D.

If user updates access level for category C, then the same change should get applied to sub-categories D and all the documents under C/D.

Only the access level "change" should be applied.

For e.g. category A had access to 5 users/groups and category C had access to 3 users/groups. Now a new user or group is added to category A, then now

Category A access to 6 users/groups and

Category C had access to 4 users/groups.

For e.g. category A had access to 5 users/groups and category C had access to 3 users/groups. Now 2 users or groups are removed from category A, then now

Category A access to 3 users/groups

Category C had access to 1 users/groups, if the 2 users/groups removed had access to category C

Category C had access to 2 users/groups, if only 1 of the 2 users/groups removed had access to category C

The actual implementation should be pretty straightforward. When a access level changes happens at a category, apply only the change to all children of that category.

From development perspective

- you need to create a function/method which will compare the change (to add or remove one or more user/group ) to existing access permissions for an entity (category or document) and updates the delta.

- Input can be a map like [{‘user A’, ‘added’}, {‘group x’, ‘removed’}, {‘user m’, ‘removed}, {‘group z’, ‘added’}]. You would already have something like this as you are updating access levels currently only for the category where its changed.

- then call that function recursively for all children of the category which is updated.

You may not want to affect the existing customers, or rollout this upgrade slowly. For that you can create a flag in knowledge base settings page - “Update access level for all children in hierarchy when adding or removing a user or group to a category”. By default this will not be checked. The above functions/methods will be called only if this setting is set to true.