Then it occurred to me: is the user allowed to edit the document at all? He wasn’t… Back in the days the Domino server used to tell you “you’re not allowed to perform that operation”, but that doesn’t seem to happen anymore: the document just stays in read mode.
The solution was to show the “edit” button only if the user is actually allowed to edit the document. To do that I wrote a function for the Visible property of the “edit” button that checks if the user is allowed to edit a document and hides it if he isn’t:
- It first checks the access level to the parent database: editors or higher are allowed to edit, readers or lower are not.
- If the user is an author it checks a field called docAuthors (which I use to store document authors in): if that field contains the current user’s username or one of its roles the user is allowed to edit.
function isAuthor( doc:NotesDocument ) {
var level = doc.getParentDatabase().getCurrentAccessLevel();
if (level >= 4) {
return true; //editor or higher
} else if (level < 3) {
return false; //reader or lower
} else { //author
var authors = doc.getItemValue("docAuthors"); //field containing all document authors
if (authors === null) { return false; } //no authors field present
var userName = @UserName().toLowerCase();
var roles = context.getUser().getRoles();
for (var i=0; i<authors.length; i++) {
if (authors[i].substring(0,1) == "[") { //role
for (var j=0; j<roles.length; j++) {
if (authors[i].toLowerCase() == roles[j].toLowerCase()) { //on of user's roles is in authors field
return true;
}
}
} else if (authors[i].toLowerCase() === userName ) { //username matches one of the values in the authors field
return true;
}
}
}
return false;
}
UPDATE 1 Serdar Basegmez came up with a Java version for this function. Since he’s from Turkey it will probably even work for users with a dotless-i in their name 🙂
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public static boolean isAuthor(Document doc, String authorField) {
try {
Database db=doc.getParentDatabase();
Session session=db.getParent();
int level = db.getCurrentAccessLevel();
if (level >= 4) {
return true; //editor or higher
} else if (level < 3) {
return false; //reader or lower
} else { //author
Vector<String> authors=doc.getItemValue(authorField);
if (null==authors || authors.isEmpty()) { return false; } //no authors field present
Vector<String> checkList=session.evaluate("@UserNamesList");
for(int i=0; i<checkList.size(); i++) {
String checkStr=checkList.get(i);
checkList.set(i, checkStr.toLowerCase(Locale.ENGLISH));
}
for (int i=0; i<authors.size(); i++) {
String checkStr=authors.get(i);
if(checkList.contains(checkStr.toLowerCase(Locale.ENGLISH))) {
return true;
}
}
}
} catch (NotesException e) {
// Nothing to do
}
return false;
}
UPDATE 2: Philipp Bauer mentioned that you can also check if the current user is allowed to edit a document with the built-in isDocEditable() function:
import com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.NotesContext;
import lotus.domino.NotesException;
public static boolean isAuthor(Document doc) throws NotesException {
NotesContext localNotesContext = NotesContext.getCurrent();
return localNotesContext.isDocEditable(doc);
}