2014-06-04

For our on-Premise SharePoint 2013 site, we needed to be able to prevent users from viewing other people’s submitted leave requests forms.  In addition, we needed to prevent users from modifying their own forms after submission.  The final requirement that we had was that the forms were not to be moved to a different library until such time as they are archived.

We started by creating our own permission level that we called Add Edit Only where the user can Add a document to the form library (by filling out the browser-enabled InfoPath form), but they cannot delete or edit the form once submitted.  We first used this portion of the solution in SharePoint 2007, and it worked well there. 

Next we needed to restrict end users from selecting any other library views except the My Documents view. Only the HR groups and the Managers group should be able to access the other library views (or even see that they exist).

Here’s how we did it:

On the Form Library page for Leave, we added the Leave Form Library webpart twice.

The first time the web part is shown on the page, the default view is set to My Documents. 

Next we edited this web part. We wanted to disable access to the other views, so we did this by checking the Disable View Selector Menu check box. The end users cannot see or select other views. They can now only see their own forms in the library. 

Finally, to allow Managers and HR members who needed to see all forms and to access all needed views, we added a second webpart of the form library and used Target Audiences to select the 2 HR groups and the Approvers group of which all approving managers are members.

The Target Audiences option is found in the Advanced section on the Edit Web Part window.

There are probably other ways to do this.  We were looking for an out-of-the box option that did not require code (jquery, c#, etc.) or any third-party tools.

And it seems to be working well so far.

About the author 

Robin Witcher