Here’s an odd question, so I’ll preface it with some information. Our company recently implemented security in axapta, and we have security roles setup for the different jobs present in the company. I noticed that in order to make a fine grain changed to security often involved browsing the permissions windows under administration->user groups->select a group->permissions. If it was something simple, it often only took a few minutes to check the right box or change a permission from full control to edit. But sometimes we spend an hour hunting down some cryptic security key.
I noticed that AX allows you to print out the security key listing table to the screen. It generates pdf/plaintext/rtf of all the security keys and their access level for that user group. The only problem is, it will only print out the highest level in the tree where the changes stop. So for instance, under accounts payable, if everything is set to Full Control, it just prints one line that says, “Full Control Accts Payable” rather than listing the thousands of individual controls underneath and their access levels (which is often different). If I manually drill down and randomly change certain levels I can get it to cough up more info, one time I got it up to about 48 pages.
So why would I want this? Well… Recently I began messing with a treeviewer program, normally used to browse file systems and show their relative size and properties. It allows me to also open XML files in a certain format when the idea struck me, I’ll simply output the security key listing in AX in plain text, convert it all to the proper structure of XML, and open them in this tree viewer, which will color code the permissions and allow me to visually compare two different user groups in the cursory glance of the eye. Since user group permissions don’t change that often after properly implemented I’ll just batch convert all the different groups into XML and save them into a folder. It would also help demonstrate to non technical employees what access certain people have.
But if I just get a few page printout from some user groups because they have many things set to the same access level I can make them matchup with other groups with hundreds more items listed, so the visual comparison isn’t as effective. Hopefully this isn’t too long winded. Any thoughts on have to print out the security keys in their complete form?