User preferences

Audience:
admin
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 • 4 minutes to read

Preferences are used to personalize SuperOffice. The aim of this is to make the application more user-friendly. We store information on default values the user has set, different visual settings, and you may even store preferences for your own application.

For example:

  • Whether the calendar starts on Sunday or Monday
  • The size of the calendar
  • The starting time of the calendar
  • The end time of an all-day event

Preferences can also be used to add default values for a document or follow-up.

Note

All preferences are stored in the UserPreference table.

Levels

Preferences can be defined at 6 different levels:

Level Description
1 global defaults
2 system-wide
3 database-wide (for example, specific to a satellite)
4 user-group-wide (all users in a particular group)
5 user-specific
6 machine-specific (stored in registry under HKLM)

User preferences are stored at multiple levels.

We always use the most specific preference for the logged-in user.

UserPreference sample table

id deflevel maxlevel owner_id prefsection prefkey prefvalue
1 2 5 0 MyThing Volume quiet
2 4 5 123 MyThing Volume off
3 5 5 456 MyThing Volume loud
4 5 5 789 MyThing Volume quiet
5 2 3 0 MyThing Color purple
6 3 3 999 MyThing Color green

The deflevel value defines which level this preference value is defined at. The values here correspond to the list above.

The maxLevel value defines the maximum level at which a preference should be shown in the GUI. Some preferences are not controlled by the user, and can only be edited in the admin tool.

The meaning of the owner_id depends on the deflevel value.

deflevel owner_id
1 0
2 0
3 satellite ID (travelcurrent_id)
4 usergroup_id
5 associate_id
6 not stored in database; stored in registry

Given the sample data above, a typical user would have the default value for the preference

[MyThing] Volume = "quiet"

since this is the system-wide default.

A user who is in primary user-group 123 would get the value "off" for the same preference since row ID 2 overrides the more general preference in row ID 1.

The user with associate_id 456 (even if he was in user-group 123) would get his user-specific preference, which is "loud".

The user with assoicate_id 789 would get the value "quiet" because of the preference with ID 4. The user-specific preference has a higher priority than any of the others, so it is the one that applies.

Note

You can define whatever section and key names you want. You do not need to register your section with SuperOffice. Just start using the section and key names directly.

If there is no value defined, you won't find a user-preference value in the table. Your code should take care to handle empty preferences sensibly.

With no default defined, we get the empty string back.

How-to

In NetServer, we can either retrieve the current values of these preferences or set our own. Selected classes can be grouped as preference caches.

Caution

Many of these preferences control important system functions, and changing the values or adding a new preference value may cause the SuperOffice application or specific functionality (like Travel or Area management) to stop working. Be very careful when changing these preferences.

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