Granting a role access to a field

Question

I have a component in my sitecore instance called an Article Download component. One of the fields for this component is called Download Item and it is the type link (not General Link). My authors are unable to update this field so my question is three-fold:

1. Could it have something to do with the fact that the link type is depreciated? Even when I grant administer rights on the component to the role a user is in, they do not have access to this field.

2. What side-effects might I see if I change the type from link to General Link? I'm wondering if I can change the type without having to do too much refactoring.

3. How can I give the authors access?

UPDATED:

Here's a screenshot of the permissions of the role on the field from the Access Viewer.

Here's a screenshot of the permissions on the field from the security editor. I'm not sure why everything is grayed out.

Answer 1

The issue does appear to have something to do with the fact that this field was using a depreciated type. The Type "link" appears to only allow editing by Admins. When I changed the type to "General Link", authors were able to edit.

I don't know what sort of side effects I may expect, but so far in my testing, everything has worked fine with the only side effect being the resolution of my problem. It appears switching from "link" type to "General Link" type is perfectly safe.

Answer 2

I just ran across this issue, and like Michael said it is caused by the Link type being deprecated. However, for me, the template using the Link type was a System template in Sitecore (Templates/System/Alias). Since I didn't want to mess with a default template created by Sitecore, I solved it by adjusting the users permissions.

In the Core database, I had to give the user Read access to sitecore/system/Field types/Deprecated Types/link. That caused all of the link options to show up for them.