Groups and regions

Regions and groups are the two axes Damvia uses to segment users. A region is chosen at sign-up and drives manager scope and license visibility; groups are memberships that can lock a collection to a subset of users. Both screens are admin only.

Regions

A region is a row of regions with a name and a mandatory default_group_id. The /admin/regions table shows Name, Default Group, Licenses (number of licenses whose allowed_region_ids contains the region) and Users (number of users in the region).

Field	Rule
name	1 to 80 characters, required
defaultGroupId	Required; the group every new user of this region joins

The initial migration creates one region named Global whose default group is the first group in the table.

Remove a region

region.remove refuses to delete the last region (Cannot remove the last region.) and refuses while users are attached (Region has users. Please move them first.). The screen opens a Move Users dialog that calls region.moveUsers, which sets region_id on every user of the source region to the target region. Once empty, deletion also removes the region id from allowed_region_ids of every license that referenced it, inside one transaction.

What a region scopes

• Sign-up: the form’s Region * select lists every region; the value is required.
• Managers: a manager only lists, approves, edits and removes users of their own region, and approval request emails go to managers and admins of the requester’s region. See Users and approval.
• Licenses: a licensed folder or file is only visible to a member whose region_id is in the license’s allowed_region_ids. See Licenses.
• Guests: a guest created by an invitation is placed in the inviter’s region.

Groups

A group is a row of groups with a name and a default boolean. Membership is stored in user_groups (user_id, group_id), which cascades on group deletion.

Procedure	Role	Effect
group.list	admin, manager	Used by the user edit form to fill the Groups field
group.create, group.update	admin	Name only, 1 to 80 characters
group.setDefault	admin	Clears the flag on the current default group and sets it on the chosen one
group.remove	admin	Refuses the default group (Cannot remove default group.) and any group still referenced by users or as a region default
group.moveUsersAndRegions	admin	Moves every user_groups row and every regions.default_group_id from one group to another

When a removal is blocked, the screen opens Move Users and Regions and asks for a target group before deleting.

Note

The default flag on a group and the default_group_id on a region are two separate things. New users are placed in their region’s default group by createUser; the group-level flag is only what setDefault toggles and what the list marks as (Default).

How a user gets their groups

• At sign-up and when a guest is created for an invitation, the user joins regions.default_group_id of their region (createUser and createGuestUser in server/src/services/user.ts).
• An admin can replace the full list of groups of any user from the Edit User dialog. A manager can do the same for other users of their region, but not for themselves.
• Group changes are applied by deleting the user’s user_groups rows and inserting the new list in one transaction.

Groups restrict collections

Every collection carries limited_to_group_ids (an array of group ids, empty by default) and can_edit_limited_to_group_ids (true by default). The visibility query in server/src/services/collection.ts combines them with the other rules:

Clause	Who it applies to	Condition
Public	members and managers	public is true, draft is false, limited_to_group_ids is empty, and the license check passes
Group	every role, including guests	The set of the user’s group ids overlaps limited_to_group_ids
Admin	admins	Every public collection, whatever the groups
Owner and invitation	every role	Unchanged by groups

Two consequences follow directly from the SQL:

• As soon as a collection has at least one group, it disappears from the generic public clause. Only members of those groups (or admins, the owner, or invited guests) still see it.
• The group clause has no draft or license condition. A user in one of the allowed groups sees the collection even when it is a draft or its license does not cover their region.

Group limits propagate down the tree

When collection.update saves limitedToGroupIds, it copies the same array to every descendant collection and sets their can_edit_limited_to_group_ids to true only if the array is empty. A sub-collection under a group-restricted parent therefore cannot loosen or change the restriction: update ignores limitedToGroupIds on a collection whose flag is false. Clearing the groups on the parent re-enables editing on the children.

Only the collection owner or an admin can call update (Collection.canEdit in server/src/entity/collection.ts). Public collections have no owner, so in practice only admins set group limits on them. Details on the rest of the collection model are in Collections and sharing.