Categories and security

Categories are integral to station security. A station’s CategoryService (under Services container) provides a Category Manager view for you to add, delete, and edit categories, as shown in Figure 261.

Figure 261. CategoryService and Category Manager (secondary) view

Each Category is really just an index (Category 1, Category 2, and so on), however, you typically name them to reflect some logical grouping. For example, you could have “Lighting” and “Floor 3” categories, and assign some objects to both, and others to just one category (or neither of these).

By default, starting in AX-3.7, a new station (created using the New Station wizard) has two default categories: “User” (category 1) and “Admin” (category 2). Formerly, no default categories were created. However (as before) category slots (1—8) still exist. Before, all objects defaulted to category 1. However, starting in AX-3.7, to encourage stronger security, selected objects now default to category 2 (Admin), including the following:

Config: Services: UserService, CategoryService, and ProgramService
Files: (all, meaning entire file space)

You can simply add categories using the Category Manager, shown in Figure 261, in order to rename indexes in a more meaningful way.

As shown in Figure 262, you typically use the Category Browser (default view of the CategoryService) to assign objects in the station to different categories. Every object must be assigned to at least one category.

Figure 262. CategoryBrowser (CategoryService default view)

In the CategoryBrowser, you use an expandable tree to navigate to objects of interest, and click in table cells to add or remove category assignments. As an alternative to explicitly assigning one or more categories to an object, you can have it “inherit” the assigned categories of its parent. This affects appearance in the CategoryBrowser, where:

Yellow rows are objects explicitly assigned into one or more categories.
Dimmed rows represent objects inheriting their parent’s category or categories.

You can also review and assign components to categories individually at the component level, using any component’s CategorySheet view. Included is a convenience link back to the CategoryBrowser (CategoryService). See Category Sheet.

By themselves, categories have little security meaning. Only when you set a user’s permissions do you reference categories. For more details on categories, see CategoryService and Category caveats.