Multiple category logic – not sure if AAM can support?

thomasario2

Hi, I’ve spent some days trying to get AAM to do what I need. I’m not sure whether it’s beyond the scope of the product or simply beyond my scope to configure 😃 I suspect (and hope) the latter.

I'm running AAM 6.4.3 with the Plus Package 5.3.4

I have a custom post type (documents) for which I have created three categories (taxonomies): region, type, and sectors. Each of these categories contain multiple terms. And each document is assigned to multiple terms.

E.g. Document 1 might be assigned to ‘Region>USA’, ‘Type>Product’, ‘Sector>A’
Document 2 might be assigned to ‘Region>Asia’, ‘Type>Service’, ‘Sector>B’
Etc., etc.

I’m then hiding all the documents by default, and adding roles for which I then unrestrict access to some terms,
e.g. Role USA might have access to USA from region and A,B and C from sectors
Role Asia might have access to Asia from region and C and D from sectors etc.

My issue is, I need a post to display only if ‘all’ terms match, e.g. if a role unrestricts 'Asia' and 'Sector A' I only want posts categorised as Asia and Sector A to appear.

However, what happens currently is that a post is returned if 'any' term has access.

e.g. my Asia role user has inherited the global restriction to all documents and I have then granted access only to region term Asia and sector term A.

But the Asia user can see all posts flagged as region Asia, including sectors B, C, D etc, as well as A. Yet in AAM they are set to have sectors B, C, D hidden.

Does that: a) make sense, and b) is there a way to achieve what I need?

Many thanks – this is driving me nuts 😃

Cheers, Tom

vasyl

thomasario2 hello there,

Indeed it does make sense and welcome to the world of access settings ambiguity. In theory, AAM should handle this type of scenario, however, while I've tried to replicate your setup, I've noticed the inconsistency with the way AAM core handles more than two custom taxonomies.

I will spend a couple of hours over the weekend and will try to find some good answers for you because most definitely AAM should work exactly the way you are expecting it to work.

I'll keep you posted.
Vasyl

thomasario2

Thanks Vasyl, much appreciated.

vasyl

thomasario2 alright. I've done my research and the quick conclusion is that it is not possible to have access settings defined your desired way due to the way WordPress core is designed, and how AAM access settings inheritance mechanism work. Obviously, with some custom coding this is doable, however, this comes with significant implications to the website performance with a large number of records.

AAM inherits settings from the bottom to the top, where the bottom level is a current user and the top level is the default access settings. The lower level overrides any access settings that are defined on a higher level. So in your case, this is what actually is happening:

When you set default access settings to all Documents for everybody and then explicitly override these default settings just for one or two terms on role level, by the time AAM inherits settings from the default level, it already determined that user should have access to a document because of USA & Product terms explicitly allows it and the A section term still did not inherit settings from the default.

Now, if you define default access settings to all Documents on the role level, and then explicitly override this for your desired terms, that will work for all settings EXCEPT HIDDEN & HIDDEN TO OTHERS. This limitation comes from the way WordPress core organizes content and how the database query is built to fetch the list of posts. I do not want to overwhelm this response with technical details so shortly I can say that this is not possible without severe website performance implications.

However, if you want to restrict the ability to manage documents (edit, delete, publish, etc.) if they are NOT in all explicitly allowed categories, then you can do that as long as access settings are defined on the same level (role or user level). For example, for the Administrator role, I've set default access to all Documents by restricting the ability to EDIT them and overwrote this restricting for A, Product & USA terms. My user was able to manage only "Document #1" that belongs to these three terms: