Contact details for users

More details of the user can be recorded to provide contact information for other iBase users who need to establish the history of a particular record or modification, or for use by Alerting. This information is available in the Property dialog of each record, and also in the Show dialog and datasheets if owner hyperlink fields are added to the entity and link types. This feature is intended for users who have iBase user accounts rather than users who use single sign-on.

Before you begin

About this task

Contact information consists of a user's:
  • Full name
  • Location (which is predefined by the security or system administrator)
  • Email address (used for email alerts, however, iBase cannot check whether the email address is valid)
  • Telephone number
  • Notes
Contact details are stored in the security file not in the database.
Note: It is simplest to ask your users to add their own details: in iBase, select Change User Information from the File menu.

You might want to assign each user a location, such as a site or department, as part of their contact details.

You can derive the location from the user name; however, the advantage of using the location field in the contact details is that the user can keep the same user name even if they move location. Typically the location is the physical location of the user rather than the location of the database.

You can structure the location name to facilitate wildcard search in the Audit Viewer.

Procedure

You must predefine the locations by adding contact information for a sample user from each location:
  1. In the Security Manager in iBase Designer, select an existing user and click Edit.
  2. Click the Information tab.
  3. Enter the location name, up to a maximum of 50 characters.
  4. Click OK.
    Note: As a security or system administrator, you can also add and modify location names in the User Information dialog in iBase.

What to do next

When you add a record or updating an existing one, you can:
  • Make yourself the owner by typing $ (if it is not already displayed); your user name is inserted when you save the record.
  • Select a different user as the owner:
    1. Click Browse next to the "owner" field to display the list of possible owners. If you know the first few characters of the name, enter these first - this will then scroll down to that position in the list.
    2. Double-click a name to select that person as the owner and close the dialog.
Users can find out who the owner of a record is when using either the Show dialog or a datasheet. There are two ways of displaying the contact details for the owner of the record:
  • Click the user name shown in the owner, or a similarly named, field. The user name is displayed as a hyperlink.
  • Click Edit and then double-click the user name.
The record owner might be a different person to the user who created or updated the record. To find out who these users were:
  1. Right-click on the record in any record list, and from the menu, select Properties to display the Properties dialog.
  2. Click the User Information button to display the contact details for the person who created or updated the record.