SharePoint Permissions Based Content
One of the challenges I always seemed to face with SharePoint was limiting content displayed based on a users access level. Marc Anderson’s (@sympmarc) SPServices library solves some of those hurdles if you’re using jQuery elsewhere, as you can call the SharePoint permissions web services to determine if a user is in a specific group, then use jQuery to write content. But what if you’re not using jQuery anywhere else, is it worth adding the jQuery library and the related web service calls to check permissions? Are you looking at hiding web parts by permissions, or changing site controls?
I recently discovered the PermissionsString attribute, which compares the user’s credentials against the defined permission string. We can then use this logic to display content relevant to the user’s permissions. This is a great alternative to calling a web service if you’re not already using the jQuery library elsewhere, or if you want to make site wide access based adjustments to the SharePoint UI. As an example, we can hide the “View all site content” link from anyone except for site admins.