A Role Section is a section type that swaps its own contents depending on which role the current user is identified as: useful when the same position should look different for a director than for a camera operator, without building and maintaining two separate positions.
Note
Restricting a Role Section to specific roles requires a Pro license. Without one, you can still add the section and create role views, but you can't switch its authentication away from requiring just a role or a role plus PIN.
Before you begin#
- At least one Role already created: see Create roles and assign permissions.
- A Pro or Enterprise license, to actually enforce role-based access on the section.
- A sense of which distinct views different roles actually need: a Role Section works best with a small number of clearly different views, not one per individual user.
Add role views to a section#
- Add a Role Section to your position (or shared section, or cuelist).
- In the inspector, find Role views: it starts empty, with "Add a role view to choose which roles can see its contents."
- Select Add role view, choose one or more roles for it, and select Create role view.
- Build that view's contents as you would any other section.
- Repeat for each distinct view you need. Each view is automatically labeled from the roles assigned to it (for example, "Director + Camera Op"); you can also give it its own icon and border color to make it easy to tell apart while editing.
To change a view's roles later, use its Edit roles action. Its context menu also offers Duplicate, Rename, and Delete: deleting a view removes any items that only exist on that view, so move anything you want to keep to another view first.
Choose how identification works#
A Role Section's Authentication Mode is limited to the two role-based modes also available on other sections:
- User role: require one of the roles assigned to a view.
- User role + PIN: require one of those roles, plus the identified user's personal PIN.
See
Authentication for basic sections for how identification itself actually happens (login, NFC, and so on): a Role Section reuses that same mechanism, it just adds role-matching on top.
Understand what a user actually sees#
- If no role view has any roles assigned at all yet, the section renders completely empty: there's nothing to gate on.
- Once a user is identified, Buttons checks their roles against every view's assigned roles:
- No match: the section stays empty and identification resets, as if no one had identified yet.
- Exactly one match: that view's contents display directly.
- More than one match (the user holds roles tied to several different views): Buttons shows a picker with one button per matching view, plus a way to log out, so the user chooses which view to enter.
Preview a role's view while building#
While editing a position, use View as role in the toolbar (Pro license required) to see the canvas as a specific role would see it, without actually signing out and back in as that role. This is an editor-only preview: it has no effect on how real devices evaluate identification, and doesn't change what's actually stored.
How this relates to Roles and Permissions#
A Role Section draws its list of roles from the same Roles you manage in
Create roles and assign permissions, but assigning a role to a view is a separate, independent thing from that role's resource permissions (its Read/Update/Delete grants on positions, connections, and so on). Giving a role access to a view only controls what that role can
see here; it doesn't grant or depend on any CRUD permission. Conversely, who can
edit the section itself (open the position, shared section, or cuelist it lives in) is governed entirely by the normal permission grants, not by the section's own role-view assignments.
There's no separate way to sign in as a specific user to confirm their exact effective access: outside of the editor's View as role preview, the only way to confirm what a real user sees is to have them (or you, temporarily holding that role) actually sign in.
If you get stuck#
What you see | What to try |
|---|
The section is completely empty for everyone. | Confirm at least one role view has roles assigned: an unassigned Role Section always renders empty. |
A user sees nothing after identifying. | Their roles don't match any role view's assigned roles: check which roles they actually hold against each view's Edit roles list. |
You can't set Authentication Mode to a role-based option. | This requires a Pro license: confirm your license tier. |
A user with two roles gets a picker instead of their view directly. | That's expected when their roles match more than one view: they choose which one to enter. |
You want to confirm what a specific person will see. | Use View as role during editing for a quick check, or have that person actually sign in for a fully accurate result: there's no admin "sign in as" feature. |
Where to go next#
