aedelmann
commented
4 years ago Hi @w4tsn
Is this something you'd see in the scope of the Vorto Project?
I got quite a few requests up to this point, to allow users with CREATOR role, being allowed to add/remove attachments to a model, but not as web attachments (links) as in #1099 but actually managing the attachment in the repository. So I can definitely see a valid use cases, you are describing. The current upload/delete of attachments is limited to only system administrators. So enabling this feature for users with CREATOR role should be a low hanging fruit. But, in this case, we would need to restrict the attachments file sizes in the whole private/official namespaces in order to avoid uploading GBs of data.
In addition to #1099 I propose the possibility to store technical documents that belong to a model version into the repository.
From a user-perspective this is much more convenient, since in some environments these documents are private or even confident which would introduce a certain complexity to link them.
It's also much more convenient for certain users, e.g. an engineer, to just attach the document with the model.
User Story
Franzi is a Technical Engineer whos goal is to provide a Vorto Model for a device she has build based on a technical reference pdf document. She requires the documents attached and versioned with the models for later reference and for documentation purposes.
Since the technical document may be valid only to this model version in particular she'd like to manage the documents on a per model basis.
The documents she'd like to add e.g. are Protocol Specifications, Standardizations or Machine Documentation.
Some colleagues may require to view those documents and work with them, but they are not allowed to change them or upload new ones.
Implementation
For a start it is sufficient to attach documents to single model versions with dedicated access rights to manage these documents.
In a succeeding version of this feature, documents should be bound to the scope of a model, but reusable on a subsequent version level. Sometimes a model get's updated but the document stays the same because not all documents got an update. This is just optimization. Most of the time, documents get updated with their model.
Confidentiality as a whole will most certainly introduce even more complexity, so I'd rather ignore that for the moment - but this could become an interesting topic in the future.
Nevertheless having #1099 would be a good start to this whole topic.
An alternative with regards to #1099 would be to have different auth capabilities for attaching links to documents behind some form of authentication.
Is this something you'd see in the scope of the Vorto Project?