How can I disable an SDL Tridion UI extension in the ribbon based on a user group in SDL Tridion 2011?

Question

I was able to hide my extension by accessing the current user's group membership with the following code in the command.js:

MyUIExtensions.MyAlternatePublish.prototype.isAvailable = 
  function MyAlternatePublish$isAvailable(selection) {

var showOption = false;
var groupsWithAccess = ["Publisher"];  // Specify all access groups here

var groups = Tridion.UI.UserSettings.getJsonUserSettings(true).User.Data.GroupMemberships;

if(groups["@title"] == undefined)  // 1 group membership
{
    if(groups.Group["@title"] == groupsWithAccess[0])
        showOption = true;
}
else
{
    // many group memberships
    for (var i = 0; i < groups.length; i++) {
        var userIsInGroup = groups[i]["@title"];
        length = groupsWithAccess.length;
        while(length--) {
           if (userIsInGroup.indexOf(groupsWithAccess[length])!=-1) {
               showOption = true;
               return showOption;
           }
        }
    }
}

return showOption;
};

I am trying to do something similar for the button that appears in the ribbon, and I read that you cannot hide them from the ribbon, and can only disable them. When I attempt to access the user's group membership via Tridion.UI.UserSettings in the IsEnabled method, the console says that this value is not defined.

Does anyone have any suggestion for either hiding/disabling a custom UI extension?

Answer 1

The IsEnabled method is there to enable the button, the IsAvailable for actually hiding/showing it.

Robert Curlette wrote a nice article about this, see http://www.curlette.com/?p=1117

You can load the details of the current user via:

var user = $models.getItem(Tridion.UI.UserSettings.getJsonUserSettings()["User"]["@ID"]);

But then you will have to ensure the user object is fully loaded, which is not something you can do in an isEnabled or isAvailable method (since you cannot delegate this method to wait for the loading of the User object). However you can access the group membership data directly from the JSON object too:

var membershipIds = "";
var array = Tridion.UI.UserSettings.getJsonUserSettings()["User"]["Data"]["GroupMemberships"];
for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
    membershipIds += array[i]["@href"] + ",";
}

Which will give you comma separated String with all TCM URIs of the groups that the current User belongs to.