Access Levels are similar to categories, and can be used to categorise assets. There is an important difference between categories and Access Levels: you can set permissions for user groups on Access Levels. This enables you to restrict assets, so that they are visible to some users but not others, and to specify the upload permissions that users have, e.g. to allow some users to upload assets while others can only download.

Access levels work in conjunction with groups - each group has a certain permission level for each of the access levels.

Admin users can maintain and edit Access Levels through the admin menu:

By default there is just one access level - called 'Universal'. You may not need to create any more - one access level might be enough for your needs. For example, you may want to give the group 'Logged in users' download permission 3 for the access level 'Universal'. This means that standard users that have logged in can download any asset (note: for more detailed information on group permissions, click here ). If you then create a group called 'Uploaders', you can set this group to have upload permission 2 on the access level 'Universal'. Any users that you then add to the 'Uploaders' group will be able to upload and edit all assets.

Once you have more than one access level in the system an admin user (and any other user that has upload permission on more than one access level) has to choose which access levels to add a new asset to when they upload it. For example, you might want to create a new access level called 'Managers Only'. If you choose to add an asset to 'Managers Only', and not to 'Universal' then it will be visible only to users that are in a group that has permission to see the access level 'Managers Only'.

Each Access Level can have the following options set:

Selected on load
When this option is selected, the acces level will automatically be selected when someone uploads an asset into Asset Bank.

Is Browsable
This option (which is selected by default when a new access elevel is added) dictates whether an Access Level can be browsed from the Browse menu.]

Always Assignable?
If this option is selected the access level can be assigned to assets even if the access level has sub-access levels. By default it is not selected, meaning that an access level can only be selected for an asset when it has no children.

Image
Like categories, access levels can be assigned images that will appear on the homepage and in the Browse view.

If an access level is not at the top-level (i.e. it was added as 'child' of an existing access level) there will be an addition option:

Has Own Permissions
This option dictates whether an access level can have its own set of permissions for each user group (set via the menu option Admin->Groups->Access Level Permissions). If the option is not selected, the access level will have the same group permissions as its 'parent' access level. This will also mean that, if the access level has sub-access levels (children), these cannot have their own permissions.

Extended Access Levels

If the category-extension-assets-enabled setting is true in your Asset Bank's ApplicationSettings.properties file then you will be given the option of creating extended access levels on the add new access level form. For a description of how extended access levels will behave, please refer to the 'Categories > Extended Categories ' section of the admin user help.