Roles and permissions

Pro

This feature is part of JS Support Ticket Pro.

A role is a starting set of departments and permissions, such as “Manager” or “Agent”. When you add a staff member and pick a role, its ticks are copied to that person, and you can adjust them before saving.

A fresh install has one role, Manager, with every permission except ALLOW_MAIL_SYSTEM, and access to the Support department the install creates.

Open People → Roles.

Column	What it shows
Role name	Click it to edit the role.
Permissions	“Manager Permissions” and so on: a read-only view of the role’s departments and permissions.

Search by Role name to narrow the list.

Adding a role

1. Click Add Role.

2. Enter a Name.

3. Under Choose what this role can access, tick the departments the role works in, in the Department Section.

4. Tick the permissions in each section. Select / Deselect All ticks or clears a whole section. The permissions reference says what each one allows.

5. Click Save Role.

The sections are:

Section	Covers
Department Section	The departments whose tickets the role works.
Ticket section	Creating, answering and managing tickets.
Staff section	Managing staff members, roles and departments.
Knowledge base section	Knowledge base categories and articles.
FAQ section	FAQs.
Download section	Downloads.
Announcement section	Announcements.
Mail section	The internal mail system.

Most permissions show as raw names, for example ADD_TICKET or TICKET_DEPARTMENT_TRANSFER; only Attachment, Add Role, Add Department, Add FAQ, Add Download and Add Announcement are translated.

How roles reach staff

• Picking a role on a staff member copies the role’s ticks into the permission editor. What is saved is the staff member’s own list.
• Editing a role later changes only what new staff members start with. People who already have the role keep their own ticks. To give everyone a new permission, edit each staff member.
• Changing the role on an existing staff member replaces their ticks with the new role’s, before you save.

What departments do

Department access decides which tickets a staff member works. Unless they have the permission to see all tickets, a staff member sees:

• tickets in the departments ticked for them,
• tickets assigned to them, and
• tickets they are watching.

The same department list limits the canned responses they are offered, and decides who automatic assignment and “all agents” notifications can reach.

Who can change permissions

On the administrator side, a Joomla Super User can do everything. A staff member who manages roles or staff from the front end needs ASSIGN_ROLE_PERMISSIONS to change a role’s ticks and ASSIGN_USER_PERMISSIONS to change a staff member’s. Even then, they can only hand out permissions they hold themselves; anything else they tick is dropped when the form is saved. Without those permissions they can still edit the rest of the record, and the existing ticks are left as they were.

Known problem in 1.3.0

The component checks permissions by different names from the ones the role and staff forms save. For example, the code asks for “Add Ticket” while the form stores ADD_TICKET. Because the names never match, a staff member who is not a Joomla Super User is refused wherever a permission is needed, even when it is ticked. Super Users are not affected. This has been reported to the developer.

Deleting a role

Click the delete button in the list. A role that any staff member was given cannot be deleted; you see “This role is in use and cannot be deleted.”