Can I restrict the viewing of an activity report of a page to certain users?
Asked by Caroline Busse:

I created a workflow with certain states with restricted user permission. E.g. only a certain group of people can review my document.

And I can overview the certain states and from whom they were approved etc. in the activity report.

Can I restrict this activity report to certain users? E.g. that only that group who is able to review my document can see the activities concerning the reviews and the other group that can e.g. publish my document can see those activities concerning the publishing?

Unfortunately I couldn't find any info in tutorials or smth. It would be very nice if someone could help me :)


Answers:
author: Mike Rink
body: Hi Caroline,

Thanks so much for being a Comala Workflows user! I'm the Product Evangelist at Comalatech, and I hope I can help you out.

Unfortunately we don't have a way to introduce restrictions into our Activity Report. One possible workaround could be to create two separate reports, and have each live on a separate Confluence page. Then you could simply use Page Restrictions to control who sees which page/report.

There are other reporting apps available in the Marketplace that work with Workflows, but unfortunately I don't know of any that support the kind of restrictions you're looking for.

Let me know if I can offer any further assistance :)

comments: author: Caroline Busse
body: Hi Mike,

thank you very much for your fast response!

So in your solution I would have to implement two seperate workflows right?


author: Caroline Busse
body: Actually I do have another question.

Is there a possibilty to display the states of my workflow ("editing" etc.) in another way than on the status bar?

E.g. place it further down on my page or maybe even display it bigger?

Thanks :)


author: Mike Rink
body: Hi Caroline, let's tackle those one at a time :)

In regards to the reporting option I mentioned above, you only need the Workflow applied to one page. You would then create two child pages under it for your reports, restricting each page to the groups you need. Then you would generate the Activity Report using the "approver" parameter to filter the content in the report. There's more information here: <https://wiki.comalatech.com/display/CWL/workflowreport+macro>

As for displaying the pages states in a more prominent way, you could do it a few different ways. We have a few macros that allow you to display the state in other places, including a [pageheader](https://wiki.comalatech.com/display/CWL/pageheader+macro) and [pagefooter](https://wiki.comalatech.com/display/CWL/pagefooter+macro) macro that you can put the state inside. If you want something a little more "in your face" there is also a [setmessage](https://wiki.comalatech.com/display/CWL/set-message+macro) macro, although this tends to be used as pages move through the workflow, as opposed to a constant on-page reminder.

Note that we also provide a REST API for the app, so if you have any developers on your team it's possible that they could write scripts for both of the above tasks.

If you have more questions please let me know!


author: Caroline Busse
body: Hi Mike,

thanks again for your quick response! You helped me out very much.

Still I have some more questions:

Is it also possible to restrict the activity report due to the different versions of the page and whom they were edited by?

So that if I created Version 5 of my Page only I can see it at first? And if I approve/publish the version the other users are able to see it?

And as far as I can see, with the pageheader/-footer etc. macro, I can only display the states somewhere else on the page, but I can still only edit them on the status bar on the top, right?


author: Mike Rink
body: Hi Caroline,

Unfortunately the app currently doesn't support the level of reporting customization that your use case describes. You *can* use Workflows to set restrictions on your pages. So you could do something where State 1 is restricted to only yourself, and so only you can access the page and the report on the page, but State 2 removes the restrictions and then everyone can see the page/report. You can do this for all the states in the workflow. But, that is driven by Confluence page restrictions, so only the page the workflow sits on can set the restrictions; you couldn't set restrictions on your report page based on a workflow on another page.

Basically, our app can't provide any kind of restriction control beyond what Confluence page restrictions can do.

And yes, the page header/footer is only a means to place the state somewhere else, you can't transition your state anywhere else besides the Workflows dialog popup in the breadcrumbs.

Hope this helps :)


author: Caroline Busse
body: Hi Mike,

thank you very much!

Now all my questions are answered.


author: Mike Rink
body: You're very welcome! Let us know if you have more questions :)


Tags: comala

workflow