[ic] Password-protecting part of a catalog

[Lara]

At 03:05 PM 2/26/03 +0000, you wrote:
> > >  Most of the catalog will be open, but specific products
> > > (maybe in specific groups) will be restricted each to a specific 
> customer.
> > >
> > > Any idea where I start on this?
>
> > Check out:
> > .access and .access_gate
>
>Thanks to both Bills for the response.
>
>It seems that .access will more or less do what I want, but it seems
>that its quite tricky to administer by my customer. From my
>understanding it could well be beyond him to add a user to an area and
>would get quite messy with many customers and many different areas.

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do, but if you can set up a form 
that writes to a table, you could probably use .access_gate quite effectively.

In .access_gate, performs a simple lookup on your_table to verify that the 
username is there:

*: [if type=data term="your_table::username::[data session 
username]"]1[else][bounce href="[area restricted_page secure=1]"][/else][/if]

No doubt this could be easily modified to recognize different levels of 
access. Perhaps if you add a field to your_table called "access_groups" 
which contains  group1, group2, etc.

If you want your customers to add to this table, you'd just set up a form 
for them that will write to your_table. I've only worked with one separate 
level of access, but I don't see why this wouldn't work quite elegantly.

Lara