The Caveat of Using “Run With Full Access Privileges”
Imagine yourself in my shoes, when you’ve been working on a massive FileMaker 5 to FileMaker 8 migration and you’re basically done with the code. You’re relieved. Now comes regression testing and in the very first phase, a seemingly simple script which checks some user permissions and performs certain actions depending on those permissions completely borks. The problem within the problem is that this has to do with permissions/privileges and keeping eyes from certain data. Thus there is a sensitivity issue that has to be dealt with and this code can’t just be commented out and included in another future version of the program. The code HAS to be fixed.
Thus, I did everything I thought of: fancy tricks with the data viewer, global calc fields, rebuilt the script from scratch, tried the script in another solution and for some reason the logic fails, even though it shouldn’t. This could become a showstopper and result in a redesign of some functionality that was competitively advantageous. In other words, if I couldn’t figure out the damn bug, I would be losing a killer feature (read: money). Now imagine my delight in reading this tip from FileMaker Advisor which says if you run a script with Full Access Privileges and check for permissions, regardless of the privilege set of the user, the returned result will be [Full Access]
[[Insert my head slap and Homer-esque DOH! here]]
I don’t find everything in FM Advisor useful, but occasionally a tip or an article comes through and it saves the day and that, in itself, pays for the subscription in my book.
What’s the point of this post then? Beware of clicking the checkbox that says Run With Full Access Privileges most especially in Privilege Set related scripts.
