Permission Preview

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The Permission Preview feature is available to full Admins only and allows you to view requests and the application as a requester or another staff person. This will give you a better understanding of visibility within a request as well as the portal in general.

Important Note:

  • You can take actions while you are previewing permissions, however, any action you take will be associated with your user account, not the user you are previewing.

Use Permissions Preview

  1. Sign in to your site

  2. Click on Signed In in the upper right-hand corner, then click Permission Preview Select permission preview from the Signed In dropdown.

  3. Select a user to impersonate from the drop-down menu or type their name or email address to search. There are also generic users you can select to view the portal at that permission level in general. Select user to impersonate dropdown.

    Note:

    This will allow you to preview what the application looks like as this user, including which controls and content they can access. You can only select other users who have lower-level permission roles in the application. Any action taken during the preview will still be attributed to your user account.

  4. Click Set Permissions to apply Set permissions button.

  5. Navigate the portal, as usual, to see what the various pages look like to another user.

    Note:

    You will see a yellow banner across the top of the page that shows which user you are viewing the portal as.

  6. Click the blue Turn off permissions preview button to exit the preview Turn off permissions preview button.

Common Errors

In some cases, you may receive an error when you attempt to navigate to a page that the user does not have access to. For example, if you try to preview a request as a requester user who did not submit the request you may receive the following error if that user does not have access.

A red error message reads 'The user you selected does not have access to this page' in white lettering.

In other cases, if you begin the permission preview session on a page that the user doesn't have access to, for example, if you use permission preview to view as a requester while on the Admin dashboard, you'll receive the following error and be brought to the front page of the portal.

A red error message reads 'Oops! Something went wrong' in white lettering.Both of these errors indicate that the user you are attempting to preview does not have access to that section or page in some way.

Taking Action on a Request in the Preview

While you are previewing permissions you will see the actions that are available to that user. However, if you take an action, like sending an external message, the action will be recorded in the timeline as being associated with your user account. You cannot impersonate a user and take actions as that user, you are only previewing what the portal looks like to them.