Access rights and inheritance

To make it easy to set up access rights, Rational® DOORS® provides a powerful inheritance mechanism. When you create an item in the database, it automatically inherits its access rights from its parent. Changes to access rights ripple all the way down through the database tree. However, they do not affect any items that have inheritance turned off, or their direct descendants.

You can turn off inheritance, by clearing Inherit from parent. The list of access rights becomes available and you can edit it and set up different access rights. Any child objects of the item inherit the new access rights, unless you edit their properties to turn off inheritance.

In the following picture, a hierarchy of items has a common ancestor A. The Inherit from parent field shows that all the items have inheritance turned on except A and D.

how access rights are inherited in Rational DOORS

The orange items (B, C, E, and H) inherit their access rights from A. The blue items (F and G) inherit their access rights from D.

If you change the access rights for A, the change automatically applies to the other orange items (B, C, E, and H). The change ripples down through the tree to all items that inherit their access rights from A. Similarly, if you change the access rights for D, the change automatically applies to the other blue items (F and G).

Example

You are managing a car project and have created an Engineering group, which is composed of John, Sue, Mark, and Jane. You want everyone in the Engineering group to have full access to all the data in the car project:

You set up the access rights for the car project, giving the Engineering group full access to the project. When you create data in the project, it inherits its access rights from the project, so the Engineering group has full access to all the data in the project.

Later, you change your mind and decide that you want John to have full access to the data in the car project, and the rest of the group to only have read access. You change the access rights for the car project:
  • You change the Engineering group entry to read access.
  • You add an entry for John, giving him full access.
These changes automatically apply to all the data in car project because all the data has inheritance turned on.

But Sue and Mark are writing the Design module, so you want to give them full access to that one module. Turn inheritance off for the Design module, and add an access entry for Sue that gives her full access to the module, and an access entry for Mark that gives him full access to the module.

Related concepts:
Access rights for projects and folders
Propagating additional access rights with create access
Access rights for link modules
Access rights for formal modules
Related tasks:
Changing database root access

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