In any business application, managing user roles is crucial for controlling access to sensitive actions. In Acumatica, one way to handle role-based business logic is by leveraging the Dependency Injection (DI) pattern. This article will demonstrate how to build a robust, role-based approval system using Acumatica's framework, with a focus on injecting user information and evaluating roles dynamically.

Why Dependency Injection?

Dependency Injection (DI) is a design pattern that allows you to inject dependencies like services or components into a class, removing the need for hard-coded dependencies. In the context of Acumatica, this pattern is especially useful for injecting user information and roles into different areas of the system, such as graphs, graph extensions, and custom actions.

In Acumatica, DI is implemented using the Autofac library. It's important to ensure that the same version of Autofac is used across your customization project to maintain compatibility. You can use DI in graphs, graph extensions, attributes, and custom actions, making it a flexible tool for extending business logic.

The Problem: Role-Based Approval Workflow

Imagine a scenario where a sales order needs to be approved or rejected based on its total value. Users assigned specific roles, such as "Clerk" or "Manager," should have the authority to approve or reject sales orders depending on the order’s total. A “Clerk” can approve orders below a threshold, while a “Manager” is needed for larger orders.

Solution: Injecting User Information and Accessing Roles

We can achieve this by injecting the current user information using Acumatica's InjectDependency, retrieving the user's roles, and then making decisions based on their roles and the sales order's total.

Let's walk through a generalized implementation.

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Injecting the Current User Information

To begin, we will inject a service that provides user-specific data, such as the current username. Using Acumatica’s Autofac-based DI, we will define a service and use InjectDependency to access it.

[InjectDependency]

private ICurrentUserInformationProvider _userInformationProvider { get; set; }

This property injects the ICurrentUserInformationProvider, an interface that encapsulates the logic for retrieving the current user's data, such as their username and display name.

2. Building Approval and Rejection Logic

Next, we will create actions to approve or reject sales orders. The action will check the user’s roles and determine whether they are authorized to approve based on the order total.

Here, the CanApproveReject method checks whether the user has the correct role to approve or reject the order based on its total value.

3. Determining the User’s Role

To determine if the current user has the appropriate role, we will query the UsersInRoles table using the injected user’s name.

4. Finalizing the Approval Rules

Based on the roles retrieved, we will implement the business logic that allows approval or rejection of sales orders.

The method ensures that clerks can approve orders below $10,000, and managers are required for orders equal to or exceeding this threshold.

Summary

By using InjectDependency to inject user information and querying the UsersInRoles table, we’ve created a flexible, role-based approval system in Acumatica. This pattern not only centralizes access to user details but also makes the code more modular, maintainable, and scalable.

Key Points to Remember:

●     Dependency Injection simplifies the management of user roles and approval workflows.

●     Acumatica’s DI is powered by Autofac and can be used in multiple classes such as graphs and graph extensions.

●     Ensure your project uses the same version of Autofac as the Acumatica instance for compatibility.

This role-based logic can easily be extended to other workflows in Acumatica, ensuring that sensitive actions are performed only by authorized personnel.