Dynamic user permissions, Multi Text Field - This week in Orchard (14/02/2021)
We also have two demos this week! One is about the Multi Text Field, a new field that can be used to define multiple selectable options to a given list, the other is about the new dynamic user permissions, which can be useful if you would like to restrict user management by their allocated roles. Read our post for more!
Orchard Core updates
Fix autoroute trailing slash
Let's say we have a site using Orchard Core, like https://www.orchardcore.net. Here if you select the Legacy Orchard option from the menu, you will be redirected to https://www.orchardcore.net/orchardcms. But if you add a trailing slash after the URL, like https://www.orchardcore.net/orchardcms/, you will get a 404 message.
The autoroute entry, in this case, is the orchardcms. Now let's see what was the fix exactly. The logic in the old code wasn't find anything that ends with a trailing slash. The new implementation now find the autoroute because it will trim the / sign from the end of the string.
Document that all shells can use a single connection string
Orchard Core extends ASP.NET Core IConfiguration with IShellConfiguration to allow tenant-specific configuration on top of the application-wide one. To learn more about ASP.NET Core IConfiguration visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/configuration. But what if you want all tenants to access the same database? The corresponding configuration can be kept in a single place, as opposed to setting up the same connection string for all tenants one by one. Check out the updated page on the Orchard Core documentation for more details!
Add shortcode resolver to HTML Field
GraphQL exposes data but if it contains shortcodes, we need to be able to evaluate them also in GraphQL. Check out the new HtmlFieldQueryObjectType that is about to render the content of the HTML Field. The code also takes into account that we need to sanitize the HTML before rendering or not.
Demos
Dynamic user permissions
We have a permission called Managing Roles that can be used to assign roles to a user but this permission is kind of unused. The goal of this new feature is to split this permission into multiple permissions. Here comes the idea of dynamic permissions, which means the delegation of which users you can manage on the Users page. If you have several users in your system you may want to only allow managing a given group of users. Let's see what it means in practice!
We set up the site using the Blog recipe and headed to Security -> Users and added several users with different roles. We just using the predefined roles now and added two users for each role.
Now let's imagine the following scenario: we would like to allow users with the Editor role to be able to manage the users with the Author role. It can be done right now, but we want to restrict the users with the Editor role to be able to manage ONLY the users with the Author role. To do that, navigate to Security -> Roles, hit Edit near the Editor role, and find the OrchardCore.Users Feature section.
Here you will see several new permissions. The View Users permission is about to be able to see the content of the Users page or not, the Manage own user information is about to be able to edit the own information. And we put a tick in the checkbox near the Manage Users in Role - Author text. Now let's try out the new permissions by logging in with the editor user. Head to the admin UI, navigate to Security -> Users (we can see that option because we say that users with the Editor role have the View Users permission), and hit Edit near a moderator user. Users with the Editor role cannot manage users with the Moderator role, which means we will see only disabled editors here, we cannot really edit anything on this page. But if you would like to edit a user with the Author role, you will be able to do that because we allowed that on the Roles page for the Editor users.
If you would like to know more about this feature, don't forget to head to YouTube to check out the recording!
Multi Text Field
Set up your site using the Blog recipe. To try out the new Multi Text Field we will edit the content definition of the predefined Article content type. To do that, head to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and hit the Edit button near the Article. Here choose the Add Field button and select the Multi Text Field as the Field Type. When you add a Multi Text Field, you can provide options to your predefined list that can be used when working with the given instances of this content type. You can set the labels and the values and also select the default one(s).
You can also have several editor types for the Multi Text Field, like Standard, Picker, or Checkbox List. You can see the different editor types in the following GIF.
You can also see a short demo on YouTube about this new field. Check it out now!
News from the community
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