How do I give an "admin" role access to all rows that are otherwise protected by Row Owners?

[Craig_Severance]

I’m building an app on a Glide Tables data source. I have personal data protected with Row Owners so each resident sees only their own record, and that part works perfectly. Now I need a small group of administrators to see all rows. I can’t get the role-based access to work, and I think I’m missing one step.

My setup:

• Users table (the built-in user profiles) has three columns: Email, Name, and Role. The Role column is plain Text and contains either Resident or Fire Admin. One user has Role = Fire Admin.
• Households table has an Owner Email column (the resident’s email) and an Admin Access column. Every row has Admin Access = Fire Admin.
• On the Households table I turned on Make Row Owner for both Owner Email and Admin Access.
• I also have child tables (People, Pets, Vehicles) set up the same way, each with Owner Email and Admin Access (= Fire Admin) as row owners.

What works: Using “View as user,” a resident sees only their own household — perfect.

What doesn’t: When I “View as” the user whose Role = Fire Admin, they see nothing — not all the households as I expected.

My question: What’s the correct, current way to make the Fire Admin value in the Users table’s Role column function as an app Role, so that a user with that role is recognized as the owner of every row whose Admin Access column contains Fire Admin?

• I looked under Settings → User data but only found email-address and cookie options, not a place to designate the roles column.
• On the Role column I only see “Make row owner” (no “Make role” option) and an Edit panel with Name / Type / “Column is user-specific.”

I’m on the free plan. Is role-based row ownership available on my plan, and if so, what’s the exact step I’m missing? A screenshot or click-by-click would be hugely appreciated.

Thank you!

[Jeff_Hager]

You most likely have not configured your role column in the user table as a role column in the user profile configuration.

Roles | Glide Docs

To access this configuration screen in the Layout Editor, click on the User Profile tab in the left panel.

Just note, there are sugar security implications in how roles can be set. You can either set via the data editor or via a server side workflow. Otherwise, if you attempt to set the user role with a client side action or app interaction workflow, it will fail to save properly.