Collection and item level permissions linked

[jangari]

I think it would be nice if collection level permissions reflected the permissions of the items within it, rather than being independently set.

Currently, a user can select access conditions independently for items and the associated collection. So I'm wondering whether it's possible to link them, with the following simple rules:

-If a user selects condition X for a collection, all items are set to condition X (after warning the user) overriding whatever condition was previously set. -If a user selects condition Y for a single item in the collection, and Y differs from other items in the collection, then the collection condition is changed to 'Mixed'. -If a user goes through each item and selects Z for all of them, then the collection level access condition is set to Z as well.

Does that make sense? This emerges because last week we emailed a bunch of depositors and asked them to update their access conditions for their items which were set to 'unspecified'. However on closer inspection, many of them had set their entire collection to 'Open', but had left items unspecified. Possibly assuming that the collection level access conditions would filter down to the items.

Can we think of cases in which we wouldn't want the collection level to reflect the totality of the items within it?

[silviapfeiffer]

I was under the impression that we already filtered collection conditions down.

"Mixed" is not a state for the collection though. The collection would just remain at whatever was set for it and it would be the default for new items in the collection.

Need to check about the "filter down" part - you seem to indicate it doesn't work.

[jangari]

Yes, my understanding is that it doesn't work - although I haven't tested it as such. But the fact that there were collections that had 'open' conditions and all items within were 'unspecified' would indicate that either a) the conditions don't filter down, or b) new items don't inherit conditions from collection, or both.

[nthieberger]

If a collection exists and has access conditions then new items inherit the condition. If a collection and items have no conditions set and then the condition is applied to the collection it is not inherited to the already existing items. Similarly, I suspect that a collection with conditions does not apply them to items if items are imported. So it is a workflow that we encourage new depositors to use, applying conditions at the collection level first, then opening new items that will inherit the conditions.

[johnf]

@nthieberger Is there anything required here?