Permission Inheritance

In NocoDocs, child documents inherit permissions from parent documents in the document tree. This keeps access control consistent. You can also change permissions at any level.

How Inheritance Works

To find the permission for a document, NocoDocs goes up the document tree:

1. If the document has an explicit permission, NocoDocs uses that value.
2. If not, NocoDocs checks the parent document, then the grandparent, and so on.
3. If no ancestor has an explicit permission, the project default applies:
   • Document Visibility: Viewers and up
   • Document Editing: Editors and up

Thus you can set a permission one time on a parent document. All its children inherit that setting automatically. You do not have to set each document.

On the permissions management page, inherited permissions have the label "Inherited from parent". Explicit settings do not have this label.

Restrict-Only Rule

Child documents cannot be more permissive than their parent. Deeper in the tree, you can only make permissions more restrictive.

For example:

• If a parent's visibility is Editors & up, you cannot set a child document to Viewers and up.
• You can set the child to Creators & up, Specific users or Nobody. All of these are more restrictive.

In the permission dropdown, options that break this rule are gray. They show the message "Cannot be less restrictive than page visibility".

Cascade Tightening

You can make a parent's permission more restrictive. Then NocoDocs resets the explicit permission of each child that is now more permissive than the parent. Those children then inherit from the parent again.

For example:

1. Parent document has visibility set to Editors & up.
2. A child document has an explicit visibility of Editors & up.
3. You change the parent to Creators & up.
4. NocoDocs removes the child's explicit permission automatically, because it now breaks the restrict-only rule. The child inherits the parent's Creators & up setting.

Thus, after a change, an old child permission cannot be more permissive than its parent.

Availability

• Document permissions require the Enterprise plan on Cloud, or an Enterprise license on self-hosted deployments.

Related

• Document Permissions: Overview of permission types and levels.
• Managing Permissions: Set and change permissions on each document.