What Are Elements and Element Groups?

The Road Rager security administrator needed to write rules that leveraged element group security. This section provides a brief overview of elements and element groups to help you understand the examples. More information about elements and element groups is in the security administration document and in other Lawson documentation.

In Lawson, an element is a product line definition for one or more fields. Its purpose is to enable a consistent definition for several fields, regardless of which program(s) they appear in and whether they have the same name. For example, Company is an element in the Lawson system and provides the data type and size definition for the Company, To-Company, and From-Company fields. In Lawson Security, you can write rules on elements to control access to the data in any field that is based on that element.

An element group is simply a grouping of elements in Lawson Security. Element groups allow you to control access to forms and files based on the values for multiple elements. For example, you could define an element group that consists of Company, Employee, and Department. You could then write Lawson Security rules for this element group that would help you control access to forms and files that contained Company, Employee, and Department.

For Company and Process Level security processing Lawson delivers two element groups that you can use in rules.

Lawson-delivered element groups

Lawson Security delivers the element groups, PROCLEVEL and HREMP. PROCLEVEL is intended to be used by applications that make use of Company and Process Level security. HREMP is specifically for use with HR applications that make use of Security Location and Security Level. (This chapter does not discuss HR applications, so the rules examples in later sections of this chapter discuss only PROCLEVEL.)