Custom workflow security settings

Question

We have a custom workflow implemented in one of the projects. Content admins could edit all contents and publish them while 'restricted' publishing users could edit all content and submit it for review (content admins get notified and then approve it to go to the final workflow state or reject it to go back to draft mode). All sections currently use the same custom workflow with custom security settings for different user groups that enable or disable publishing.

Right now they want to create a new user role that would have content admin rights in certain sections of the website and restricted publishing rights in other sections. Since all security settings are managed directly within this workflow I'm wondering if there is a way to accomplish it without having to create new workflows?

Answer 1

I am not aware of a way to do this out of the box. Here are some things you can try...

1. Create a custom workflow action that removes the users write access after a specific step for specific locations in the content tree. The downside to this is that they will not be able edit the item after this step. So if they want to create a new version then someone would need to give them access again and they could potentially publish an unpublished item.

2. You could also create a custom workflow action that fires first during the publish action. This action would check to see if that user should be able to publish and if not stop the execution of the workflow step and show them a message.

.

public void Process(WorkflowPipelineArgs args)
    {
        if (CanUserProceed())
        {
            Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Alert("You do not have permission to proceed.");
            args.AbortPipeline();
        }
    }

Answer 2

You can create a new role, open the security editor from the control panel and start assigning the permissions for all the sections of your content and also you can assign the permissions for the workflow items too based on what the users in this role can do on every item in each workflow state.