User Groups - a silly question?

sljsmith · March 25, 2018, 12:03am

Hi folks:

What are user groups? And, why are we warned against using them (https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Administration_Globals#Disable_User_Groups)?

Just wondering what they are (and if they aren’t relevant any longer, why they’re still in the code)… Thanks.

brady.miller · March 25, 2018, 12:51am

Hi @sljsmith ,

This is honestly something I don’t know much about and it’s tough to really figure it out in the code since the 'groups' sql table which seems to hold these associations is such a common name(ie. if it were a more specific name then could search the codebase to get an idea of where it is used, whether it is even used, and if it should simply be removed). @sunsetsystems may know more on this. If it’s not being used, though, removal sounds like a good idea.

-brady

brady.miller · March 25, 2018, 1:05am

To follow up on this if I do a grep/search for Select.*groups, I at least get some info on this where it is being used in auth.inc and login_operations.php.

And looks like there are some details here on this:

github.com

openemr/openemr/blob/master/library/auth.inc#L245-L251


/***************************************************************
//pennfirm
//Function currently user by new post calendar code to determine
//if a given user is in a group with another user
//and if so to allow editing of that users events
//
//*************************************************************/

And that function validateGroupStatus() is used in the calendar in some places.

Another way to get another idea of this is by grepping/searching the global disable_non_default_groups , which also provides some insights.

It appears that all this does is theoretically allow users to edit/delete appts if they are in the same group.

-brady