Odoo v8: How to limit user access to contacts

Question

I'm using Odoo v8 and need a means to prevent certain users (either (preferably) in a sales team or in a user group) from accessing certain contacts (assigned to a different sales team) or the contacts at all.

I tried to achieve this via Record rules but don't seem to get this to work.

Answer 1

Users and user roles are critical points concerning internal security in OpenERP. OpenERP provides several security mechanisms concerning user roles, all implemented in the OpenERP Server. They are implemented in the lowest server level, which is the ORM engine. OpenERP distinguishes three different concepts:

• user: a person identified by its login and password. Note that all employees of a company are not necessarily OpenERP users; an user is somebody who accesses the application.
• group: a group of users that has some access rights. A group gives its access rights to the users that belong to the group. Ex: Sales Manager, Accountant, etc.
• security rule: a rule that defines the access rights a given group grants to its users. Security rules are attached to a given resource, for example the Invoice model.

Security rules are attached to groups. Users are assigned to several groups. This gives users the rights that are attached to their groups. Therefore controlling user roles is done by managing user groups and adding or modifying security rules attached to those groups.

Users

Users represent physical persons using OpenERP. They are identified with a login and a password,they use OpenERP, they can edit their own preferences, … By default, a user has no access right. The more we assign groups to the user, the more he or she gets rights to perform some actions. A user may belong to several groups.

User groups

The groups determine the access rights to the different resources. A user may belong to several groups. If he belongs to several groups, we always use the group with the highest rights for a selected resource. A group can inherit all the rights from another group

Rights

Security rules are attached to groups. You can assign several security rules at the group level, each rule being of one of the following types :

- access rights are global rights on an object,
- record rules are records access filters,
- fields access right,
- workflow transition rules are operations rights.

You can also define rules that are global, i.e. they are applied to all users, indiscriminately of the groups they belong to. For example, the multi-company rules are global; a user can only see invoices of the companies he or she belongs to.

Concerning configuration, it is difficult to have default generic configurations that suit all applications. Therefore, like SAP, OpenERP is by default pre-configured with best-practices.

Access rights

Access rights are rules that define the access a user can have on a particular object . Those global rights are defined per document type or model. Rights follow the CRUD model: create, read (search), update (write), delete. For example, you can define rules on invoice creation. By default, adding a right to an object gives the right to all records of that specific object.

Record rules

When accessing an object, records are filtered based on record rules. Record rules or access filters are therefore filters that limits records of an object a group can access. A record rule is a condition that each record must satisfy to be created, read, updated (written) or deleted. Records that do not meet the constraints are filtered.

For example, you can create a rule to limit a group in such a way that users of that group will see business opportunities in which he or she is flagged as the salesman. The rule can be salesman = connected_user. With that rule, only records respecting the rule will be displayed.

Field access rights

New in version 7.0.

OpenERP now supports real access control at the field level, not just on the view side. Previously it was already possible to set a groups attribute on a <field> element (or in fact most view elements), but with cosmetics effects only: the element was made invisible on the client side, while still perfectly available for read/write access at the RPC level.

As of OpenERP 7.0 the existing behavior is preserved on the view level, but a new groups attribute is available on all model fields, introducing a model-level access control on each field. The syntax is the same as for the view-level attribute:

_columns = {
    'secret_key': fields.char('Secret Key', groups="base.group_erp_manager,base.group_system")
 }

There is a major difference with the view-level groups attribute: restricting the access at the model level really means that the field will be completely unavailable for users who do not belong to the authorized groups:

• Restricted fields will be completely removed from all related views, not just hidden. This is important to keep in mind because it means the field value will not be available at all on the client side, and thus unavailable e.g. for on_change calls.
• Restricted fields will not be returned as part of a call to fields_get() or fields_view_get() This is in order to avoid them appearing in the list of fields available for advanced search filters, for example. This does not prevent getting the list of a model’s fields by querying ir.model.fields directly, which is fine.
• Any attempt to read or write directly the value of the restricted fields will result in an AccessError exception.
• As a consequence of the previous item, restricted fields will not be available for use within search filters (domains) or anything that would require read or write access.
• It is quite possible to set groups attributes for the same field both at the model and view level, even with different values. Both will carry their effect, with the model-level restriction taking precedence and removing the field completely in case of restriction.

Note

The tests related to this feature are in openerp/tests/test_acl.py.

Warning

At the time of writing the implementation of this feature is partial and does not yet restrict read/write RPC access to the field. The corresponding test is written already but currently disabled.

Answer 2

You can add a Rule for a group of users. I just made it and it's work fine.