Permissions and block visibility

A simple use case explaining how to work with permissions and sharing blocks on company, organization and public levels.

After reading this article, you’ll know how to:

• Work with roles and permissions on company and organization levels

• Change block visibility for different levels of access

One of the main powers of Betty Blocks is the reusability of certain components, steps, and other functionality sealed in blocks and can be shared among different platform builders. However, we must ensure that only specific groups can access the blocks we share. In this article, we’ll look at how to handle roles and permissions and enable other builders to share blocks.

Permissions on a company level

First, you should understand where you stand within your company and organization and what permissions you have.

Company admin

Suppose your company role is defined as Admin. In that case, you have permission to view and work with the company overview: manage organizations and applications that belong to your company, assign company user roles, and set roles and permissions at a company level.

Proceed to My Betty Blocks > Company (1). Then open the Users (2) tab and you’ll see your profile on top with a company role (3) assigned to your account, along with other accounts.

By heading to the Roles & permissions tab, you’ll see what permissions the company roles have. As an Admin, of course, you are authorized to all the permissions available by default.

But let’s say, you want to give some of your employees another role enabling them to work closely with company blocks, not getting involved in editing company data or changing roles for other company users.

Toolkit manager

For this purpose, we created a new company role of Toolkit manager from the Roles & permissions menu. The Toolkit manager will be able to manage blocks and view company and user management. To assign these permissions, go to the Toolkit manager role and tick the following permissions:

• Company: View company & View company blocks

• User management: View user management

• Leave out everything from Roles and permissions

• Toolkit management: tick everything enabling Release a block, Change block’s visibility, and so on.

Returning to the Users tab (as a company admin), you can change a user’s company role to Toolkit manager.

Once the changes have been applied, the selected user can no longer reach the restricted features (like changing roles and permissions of other users) from their account.

Organization level permissions

There are also roles and permissions on an organization level. To view or edit those, go to Organizations > [Name of organization] > User management / Roles & permissions

From the User management page, you can invite new users to your application, who will also join your organization. You might need to add a new organization role via the Roles & permissions page if you’d like to restrict some permissions for this role on the organization level.

Again, suppose you want to open certain block-managing capabilities for your organization/application user. In that case, it’s done only from the company overview and only if you have Admin (or close to Admin) permissions.

Block visibility

When you’re sure of what your roles and permissions are, we can proceed to the process of sharing blocks on different levels.

Let’s say we’ve just created a new theme block. Even before releasing it, you can easily manage its availability for other builders using the Visibility button in a block menu. Here you can define who this block is visible to:

• Company: make it visible on the whole company level

• Organization: keep it to your organization only

• Public: share the block with other Betty Blocks users

You can always return to the block overview on a company level. Go to Company > Blocks (1) tab. Use the search bar (2) on the right to find the needed block, and filter on block types and block visibility (3).

A single block overview displays the information like:

• Block name

• Type: component, theme, data source, etc.

• Developers who created this block

• Visibility: organizations, company, public (all the Betty Block users), and developers (restricted only to Betty Blocks developers)

• Released: status showing if the block was released or not

• Date the block was created

If you want more information about managing blocks, see this article.