Home Directories

Home Directories

dbFM offers the facility of personal home directories for users.

Users with a home directory will notice an icon in their file browser, level with the column headers (see below)

the home directory icon

Clicking on the home directory icon takes the user directly to the home directory. The home directory is not visible to other users (unless they have administrative privileges) and the directory is 'locked' - you may not move or rename it. Files that users upload into the directory will automatically be accessable ONLY to that user (and the administrator). However, it's possible to use the properties tab to edit the file permissions and make individual files accessable to other users of the system. For example, if you wanted to link a file under your HOME directory to a node then you would open the properties tab and change the Read Access to Public for that file.

Setting up home directories (admin users only)

On the main dbfm admin screen (admin/settings/dbfm) there are 3 entries associated with setting up HOME directories:

the HOME admin options

The first entry MUST be ticked to enable the HOME directory feature. If you have been using HOME directories and you then choose to untick the box the users will no longer see the HOME icon in their browser (although any files and directories will not actually have been removed). Having enabled HOME directories the admin user needs to decide which users will be entitled to have them. Navigate to the user permissions screen (admin/user/permissions) and tick 'home dbfm' for those roles that you want to have HOME directories.

setting permissions for HOME directories

Once this is done, whenever a new user is added with a role that entitles them to a dbfm HOME directory, a directory with appropriate permissions will be automatically added to the file system beneath the HOME root directory. The file ID for this home directory is stored as an entry in data field of the user table. The entry is made automatically and looks as follows:
s:9:"dbfm_home";s:3:"120";  - so you have a 9 character string 'dbfm home' followed by the file ID, in this case 120.
An admin user could insert the file ID of any directory in this entry if there was a need for a user to have a directory other than default user home associated with the icon.

Admin users should decide, before any HOME directories are generated, what the HOME root directory should be called - the default is "HOME".

The 'Generate home directories for users' checkbox is used where you already have users defined for your system, and have just enabled the home directory feature. When you save the admin page the program will generate a HOME root directory if one doesn't already exist and populate it with a directory for every user currently entitled to have one.