ACL breaking my head

[brilliantweb]

Hi

I have read through the documentation and tried to apply it to my situation, but I am not getting it!

No frontend upload required at all
All my categories except 1 should allow public view and download
A single category requires public view, registered download

For the registered download, I want users to have to accept a licence.
I have that part working, but mention it just in case it affects the ACL implementation.

Thanks
Brendon

[ColinM]

Hi
You may be aware of some of the items below but I have included them for completeness just in case.

Firstly I would confirm that the licence acceptance is not related to to any view Access or Download permissions.  You have obviously set the User Groups Settings for the Registered User Group to allow this.

A second point to note is that what users can see and what users can do are different things.  What can be seen is controlled by the view Access.  What they can do, in this case download, is controlled by the Permissions.  The View Access and Permissions are not related.

A further aspect to note is that members of a User Group (UG) are also members of the parent, grand parent and so on of that UG.  One cannot get around that 'heritage'.  So a member of the Registered UG is also a member of the Public UG irrespective of what you 'ticked' in the user group membership for any user.

In your case you want everyone to be able to see all Downloads. So all the Categories and all the Downloads need Public Access.  This is the normal default.  If your top level categories have Public view Access then any category or Downloaded added will also have Public Access.  But if you have changed it the you may have to set them again individually.  Just check in the backend on Categories and then on Downloads that the Access, as shown in one of the columns, is set to Public.  You can often save time by ordering the categories/Downloads by clicking the Access column header. After ensuring all Access is set to Public then all users should be able to see all downloads.  Whether they can or cannot download depends on the permissions, which are in an 'unknown' state.

The next step is to set up the Permissions.  This depends to a certain extent on the way you have set up the categories. For this purpose I assume you have at least two top level categories.  One of them I will call Open-cat which contains, possibly in subcategories all the Downloads that are to be downloadable by the Public, including Registered.  The other top level category I will call Restricted which has Downloads, again possibly in sub categories, that are only downloadable by users in the Registered UG.

Also if you find in your situation you have ever set a permission to Deny then it is almost certainly wrong.

NB in the following ignore the Super Users UG
First we need to get to a known state so go to the jD control panel - Tools and use the two Permission Reset tools.
Next we need to ensure all the Download permissions of the Component Permissions for all UGs are set to Inherit.  These permissions are accessible through the Options button on the jDownloads Control Panel.  You have to look at each UG in turn and ensure that all Download permissions are set to inherit.  At this juncture all users should be able to see all downloads but no one can download

At this stage no one, except the Super Users, can download anything.
So now go to the 'Resticted' category and set the Download permission of the Registered UG to Allowed and save. To check go in again to the Restricted cat permissions and look at each UG in turn.  Make sure that the Computed permission is  set to Inherit for each UG except for the Registered UG where it should be Allowed.  At this point members of the Registered UG should be able to download from the Restricted cat and following but not yet from the Open-cat category and its subdirs.

So we now complete the process by going to the Open-cat category.  Here we look at the permissions of the Public UG and set the Download permission to Allowed and the Save.  Again re enter the Open-cat category permissions one UG at a time and check that the Public UG has Download Permission but all other UGs have Inherited permission for Download.  The Computed permissions should show what you want as appropriate.

Please let us know the result.

Colin

[brilliantweb]

Hi Colin

Thanks for the excellent instructions.
I followed them carefully and everything worked perfectly.

Thanks
Brendon