Permissions by Column

I want to start off by saying I LOVE creating apps on Glide. This team has saved us 100’s of thousands of dollars in hiring / performance management software - so thank you!

I wish there was a way to assign permissions to a column in a similar way that you can assign permission by row owners and protect columns.

For example, say I have servers, bartenders, managers and owners. Owners can see the pay for everyone, managers can see the pay for servers and bartenders and those folks cannot see any rates other than their own.

I’d like to assign these permissions numbers like 1 = crew, 2 = manager, 3 = owner. Then the logic in the drop down could be something like “if # in user column’s role > the row’s role, show column. If not, protect column.”

I have a private pro app for restaurant hiring and performance management.

The “Employee Data” tab contains the employee’s name, pay rate, position, email, phone, etc. so a mix of data that would be fine for everyone to view and some that is sensitive that managers can see based on their permission setting (i.e. pay rate). This is protected by row owner (user + department that has access to view the data).

I have an “Our Team” list. You can click on the employee, read their bio and send them a reward to recognize peer-to-peer performance. Since I visibility isn’t the safest option, the “Our Team” list is a Glide table and doesn’t contain sensitive info. It can be viewed by anyone in the app.

Anytime an employee changes something on their profile - like a promotion from server to bartender - the update hits both the google sheet and glide sheet. It would be awesome if I could just modify the permission of a column instead of a whole row.

Thanks!

Alexis, that is awesome to hear that Glide has had such a profound impact on your company!

I hope I am understanding the problem correctly and will try to help you out although I feel like you might have enough experience that my response will seem obvious. If I miss the point, please forgive me.

Couldn’t what you want be done with filtering? Often I have multiple lists with visibility filtering set by a person’s role. So, manager will see list 1 that shows all details while a team member will see list 2 with the filtered details.

Hi Darren, appreciate the response! Yep, I do use filtering and conditional visibility for now. It’s more about mitigating any kind of risk for the data to be viewed by someone without access.

I find that I’m constantly copy and pasting screens or sections of the app that I like to adjust the user interface and then constantly second guessing, “did I set that visibility up like I intended?”

It might just be an annoyance based on how my app is set up.

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Filtering and Visibility isn’t reliable if someone snoops the data. For something like an employee’s pay, it’s important to keep it protected. What I would suggest is to have a separate pay table that contains an email column, two role columns, and the pay amount column. Then assign row owners to the email and role columns. Finally you can create a single relation and a lookup from the employee table to the pay table. The row owners in the pay table will keep the pay protected and only show to those that have ownership of that pay data.

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For sure! Yep - I have the pay data set up on a different sheet based on row owners and then use the “contact sheet” as my screen to tie everything together. It can just feel like a labyrinth of screens and sheets at times since my payroll team and I would like to see everything on one line.

Just a matter of building a better query for it than the one I use now.

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@david another use case for “column owners” we discussed a while ago.

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