How to manage the concept of hierarchy for your Intranet

In many big structures, we have often to confront ourselves to the question of the hierarchy. Then, some specific needs will be asked, for instance :

“How can the HR can publish specific documentation that are not allowed to other ?”.
- No problem, we have a wonderful module called Organic Groups (OG) that handles this easily, where you can divide up whatever content you need in specific groups. Just create a HR group and put your documents in there.
- Well, perfect, but in our organisation HR is not a simple “group”, we have a whole hierarchy some of these documents will be allowed for board only although others could be viewed by every HR services.

With this basic example, you might understand that with OG only, you have to create different layers of groups which can easily be messy when you deal with a wide hierarchy.

--> The solution comes then with Group Audience field in OG + OG Subgroups module that already existed in Drupal 6 and has been ported in Drupal 7.

In this tutorial we are going to see:

• How to create several groups and organize them in a tree
• Create a content type and put it in a group
• Use Entity Reference Tree Module to have a nice tree view of Group Audience
• Specify for the content type that it can belong only to a single group type
• Use OG subgroup to spread the “read-only” rights to all children (parents, or both)

Create Groups and Documents based on hierarchy

Watch the video!

Step 1: Install Drupal and the following modules (Drupal 7.9 is used in this tutorial)

- OG (1.3 is used in this tutorial) + OG access control + OG UI
- Entity API (OG dependency)
- Features (Not necessary, but very convenient to manage content types)
- Entity Reference Tree
- OG Tree Views (Deprecate - Not usefull anymore)

Normally it will ask to rebuild permissions, if not go to admin/reports/status/rebuild

Step 2 : Create a new OG Group content type (called “Unit” in this tutorial), that is also a Group content and change the Groups audience widget to “Tree view field”

Step 3 : Create several units that will belong one to another (the idea is to create a tree)

Step 4 : Create a new role called “contributor” and several users that you will attach to this role

Step 5 : Choose randomly some Units where you will put these Users (Ordinarily a user belongs to a single Unit)

Step 6 : Create a new content type (called “Document” in this tutorial), set it as Group content and change the Groups audience widget to “Tree view field”

Step 7 : Go to admin/config/group/fields and add to Document the “Group visibility” field

Step 8 : Create a new Feature called “Document” where you add the Document content type, save it, add it to the module folder.

Step 9 : Add the following lines to document.module, if you wish to restrict your user to choose a group audience where they belong. Then activate your new Document Feature.

function document_form_document_node_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
  global $user;
  $account = user_load($user->uid);
  $i = 0;
  $allowed_ids = array();
  while (isset($account->{OG_AUDIENCE_FIELD}[LANGUAGE_NONE][$i]['gid'])) {
    $group = og_load($account->{OG_AUDIENCE_FIELD}[LANGUAGE_NONE][$i]['gid']);
    $allowed_ids[] = $group->etid;
    $i++;
  }
  $form['group_audience'][LANGUAGE_NONE]['#allowed_ids'] = $allowed_ids;
}

Allow read-only propagation based on the hierarchy

Watch the video!

Step 1 : OG Subgroups + custom patch provided

Step 2 : Go to admin/config/group/subgroups and select Document Group content.

Step 3 : Go to admin/config/group/fields and add to Document the “Subgroup direction” field.

Step 4 : Create a new Document and choose the subgroup direction wished and choose visibility “private”

Step 5 : Test it with the users you previously created, you will see that only the users belonging to the group and the one below and/or above (depending on the direction chosen, will be able to display the document

Restrict the group audience to only a single group type

Step 1 : Create a new group content type (called “Projet” in this tutorial)

Step 2 : Add the following lines to document.module, if you wish to restrict the document only to “Unit” groups. If you already add a the document_form_document_node_form_alter mentioned above, you may only need to add line $bundle_name = 'unit'; the if condition and unset function.

function document_form_document_node_form_alter (&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
  $i = 0;
  $bundle_name = 'unit';
  while (isset($form['group_audience'][LANGUAGE_NONE]['#allowed_bundles'][$i])) {
    if ($form['group_audience'][LANGUAGE_NONE]['#allowed_bundles'][$i]['bundle_name'] <> $bundle_name)
      unset ($form['group_audience'][LANGUAGE_NONE]['#allowed_bundles'][$i]);
    $i++;
  }
}