Ran across a potential issue with group administration and although it does not cause a security concern it poses some confusion with regards to parent/child folder membership inheritance. The purpose of my post is to understand if this is expected behavior and if so what's the rationale.
If you create a group named parent, then add new child group then add user to child group membership the child group shows as direct member type and user1 shows was inherited membership type when viewing the parent group. For example:
If you edit the child relationship and remove parent reference the memberships update accordingly which results in expected outcome of
If you however you just remove the child group form the parent the parent group, membership updates correctly however when viewing the child group the parent relationship is still present.
For future group maintenance this could be a bit confusing as one would expect if you added members to child group it would reflect in the parent membership inheritance but it no longer will.
Is there feature reasons the child group parent relationship is not broken when child group is explicitly removed form the parent group's membership?
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
Hi btravis
If you remove the child group from the parent, only the group gets removed, not the relationship. You need to explicitly remove the parent relationship in the child group properties for the child group to be independent.
Hi, thanks for replying.... yes I was aware that if you remove the relationship it removes the membership as well. My question is more directed toward why doesn't Appian remove the relationship when then child folder member is removed from the parent folder. Is there some value in leaving the parent folder relationship in tact?
I think it might have to do with the group security. When you create a child group from parent, it inherits the security from the parent. When you remove the child group from the parent, had the relationship been removed the administration priviledges (security) would also be removed and there's a high possibility for any process/UI to break. Therefore, Appian makes sure that the relationship is intact even when the sub group is removed and if someone removes the parent relationship, he should update the group security as well.
Hi ankitab0001, that does make sense. thank you.
I think I see the issue you're talking about, however (just FYI) it makes it a bit confusing to read when you refer to "folders", since Groups are not Folders in any sense (other than being a logically similar grouping device). But in terms of Appian objects, Groups have nothing at all to do with "folders".
Thanks btravis If you are satisfied with my answer may I request you to mark it as verified
I have updated the post to remove references to "folder" terminology to make it clear I was referring to group hierarchy.
Cool, thanks I've re-read it and it's quite a bit more clear now, at least for me.