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I've noticed the useful Author Roles extension which allows authors to only see/edit their own entries. I just wanted to check if it would be useful in my particular use case or if there's another way to do it.

I'll be importing XML from 10 or so different sources. I have two Sections: Agents and Properties. Each Property (entry in Symphony) will be associated with an Agent (entry in Symphony). I'll need to make some kind of link with the Select Box Link field (but I haven't quite figured out how to do that automatically on import yet). What I ideally need is a way to setup a user account for each Agent listed in Symphony which only allows them to see Properties related to them. Is this possible with either Author Roles or any other means that anyone can think of?

While there is no real way of auto importing Authors yet, it is one of the easily accessible tables in the database.

You could write an SQL script based on your list of Agents and import that. I'd use a generic password that is MD5 hashed to fill in that column of the table.

Once done, you can reference the Author by name in your XML Imported data for the Properties, and it should link up perfectly. If you then needed a section like an Agent Profile or something, you don't have to worry about SBL linking the two sections (although I have a great method for doing that too). You would just reference the same Author account in each section and use that as the link.

I don't necessarily need to import the authors as such but just link them to properties. There are only about 10 or so so it's not too much of a bother creating them and they are also pre-defined.

Once done, you can reference the Author by name in your XML Imported data for the Properties, and it should link up perfectly.

Got an example? I'm not sure I'll always have an Agent name associated with the properties within the XML feed itself but each one will come from a unique and identifiable source. Is there still a way I can then link all the properties coming from a specified source to an Agent (and correspondingly to an author of the same name)?

I wouldn't need a separate Agent Profile section because the Agent Section is exactly that. It just lists all the agents and their contact details. This is static and not imported - all entered within Symphony with just a few basic fields.

It all depends then on what the XML structure is that you have.

Can you post an example?

Well that's the tricky part. Each Agent uses a different system and the system each have their own XML schemas so I know the data will be there but I don't yet know what it all looks like. I'm presuming that I'll create an XML importer for each and use a little XPath to map the required nodes to fields(?)

For systems which don't yet have an XML output I'm defining this structure to use.

Heheh, yeah, you'll have to import each separately then. I've been there.

our schema looks fine too. If the disparate data gets a lot to handle, you could use xsl to transform it to a standard schema to import. That's the beauty of the tools we use.

Yeah, I anticipate a bit of processing work involved there but hopefully not too painful. This is the reason I'm diving straight in with Symphony on this one. It's perfect for this type of thing.

If the disparate data gets a lot to handle, you could use xsl to transform it to a standard schema to import.

By this do you mean outside of Symphony? I had considered it but I guess it depends on how tricky each one is to process. I'd probably try and keep it all in Symphony if possible just to keep it all together. Some of these things will be trial and error along the way.

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