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Recently, I was working on a solution where some users only had View access to specific records in one of the tables. I set up a privilege set to do what I wanted, and – once I had worked the kinks out – things were working pretty smoothly; the test account I created could only see data in the records they were supposed to. The only hiccup was that the rest of the records showed up with “<no access>” in the fields – which is kind of ugly, and not what I wanted the user to see.

I could have set up a script that constrains the found set to what I wanted, but there is a simpler solution. When you do a search, FileMaker doesn’t include any records that the user doesn’t have access to view. So, you can do a search – any search – and it only shows records that you want the user to see. So I set up a simple, one line script that searches on a serial number field in the database using an asterisk (*). Since every record in the table has a value in that field, this basically finds all the records, excluding the records that the user shouldn’t be able to see.

So why not use Show All Records instead? Because, by default, Show All Records returns every record in the table, regardless of whether or not the user has access to view them. This returns us to the original problem – a list full of records displaying “<no access>”. By doing a search, the user only sees the records that we want them to see. You can go a bit further by creating a custom menu that overrides the Show All Records functionality with the find script mentioned above. That way, even if the user manually does a Show All Records they will still only see records that they have access to.

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