Message Visibility

By default, any user with the Get permissions to an item can see messages that have been posted on the Board of that item. However, it is sometimes desirable to restrict more tightly the visibility of messages on items. This can be achieved using message visibility control, also known as the Share with control.

When this option is used, all users with the Get permissions to an item and who belong to the selected Identity will be able to see the message.

The settings for the configuration of message visibility are found on Discussion Template, as described in full in section 4.1 above.

Discussion Template settings

Based on these settings you can achieve the following behaviors for the Share with selector.

Share with selector behaviors

The point of the Default Visibility Identity is to provide a way to restrict messages by default to a smaller subset of users, rather than forcing the user posting the message to always must remember to set something other than World.

When the Share with selector is enabled, users will be able to select any available Identity to share the message with. This can be an alias identity (person) or non-alias identity (group). The following identities are not available for the user to select:

• System identities (Team identities, Forum Reader, etc.)
• The user’s own identity (Sharing a message with oneself is not supported)

When the user initially picks the selector, a list of certain pre-set options will be available, as shown in Figure 35.



This list will include:

• World
• The item’s Creator (created_by_id)
• The item’s current Owner (owned_by_id), if set
• The item’s current Manager (managed_by_id), if set
• The ItemType’s default visibility identity if set

These presets just make it easier to pick some of the common identities that may be used in typical messaging situations. Note that if assignments of Owner or Manager change later, it does not change the visibility of already-created messages (all messages are set to a specific Identity at time of creation).

If the user starts to type a name, the system will display matching Identity names. At any point the user can pick the desired Identity name.

When a message is posted with the Share with Identity set to something other than World, an icon will be displayed in the lower-left corner of the message. By hovering over this icon, a tooltip will appear which shows the shared-with identity, as shown here:

For Reply messages, the tooltip will show both the original sender and the Share with Identity.

When message visibility is set to an alias Identity (a single person), special handling is used to make sure that the recipient will be able to see this “private message”. Display of messages in a user’s “My Discussions” window is based on whether the user is following either the sender of the message, or the item the message is posted on, in his Bookmarks. Notification is in turn based upon what messages appear in the user’s “My Discussions” window. So, if the “recipient” of a private message is not following the sender or the item in his Bookmarks, he would not see the message in his My Discussion window. To avoid this issue, the system automatically adds the message to the user’s My Discussion window, within the bookmark “My Messages”. This means also that the message will be included in any notifications.

Messages where the “Share with” Identity is set to a group (non-alias Identity) do not have any such special handling.