Hierarchy Maintenance

Question

I am trying to create an organizational hierarchy similar to the one below:
Company
***Series
******Division
*********District
************Unit

I currently require that a Company be selected when creating a new Series/Division/District/Unit. My goal is to establish the parent-child relationship when creating a non-Company object; i.e. I want to set "MemberOf" to a single object one level higher in the hierarchy.

How can I, when creating a Division for example, allow the user to select a Series object that should serve as it's parent and filter the Series list to include objects related to the selected Company? (I would like to be able to use the same idea and assign a Division when creating a District and a District when creating a Unit.)

Answer 1

Hello,

Currently, it is not possible to dynamically set possible values for a property based on another property. It is a popular request, but it is not available yet. Thus, you will not be able to provide a list of series based on the selected company, or a list of divisions based on the selected series. However, there is a workaround.

As far as we understand from online conversations with you, the companies, series, divisions etc will be represented as groups in your AD, and you want to use the Member / Member Of properties to build your hierarchy. That is, a Series, for example, will be a member of the Company it belongs to, and will have its Divisions as direct members.

We suggest creating several actions in the Web Interface, one for each group type, e.g. Create Company, Create Division, Create District etc. When a user wants to create a district, they will need to do the following:

1. Click the Create District action on the Web Interface home page.
   

2. Enter the name of the new district.

3. Also, they will need to select the parent Division. For this purpose, we suggest using a certain property of the new district. We suggest using Assistant. This property supports the DN syntax and allows selecting objects directly in AD. This means that users will be able to pick the parent Division group.
   
   When picking a parent Division, the Web Interface will show descriptions of each division. The description will contain the names of the parent Company and Series, so users can find the necessary division.
   

4. When the user clicks create, the following actions will be performed:

   • A new District is created.
   • The new District is added as a member of the Division specified in the Assistant property.
   • The description of the new district will be set to the parent Company, Series and Division. Thus, when users create a new Unit, they can understand where the new division belongs to.

You will be able to make the Assistant property required, so that users cannot create a group without specifying a parent, and also specify a different name for the property, if necessary.

If you are OK with such a solution, can you provide more details on how you want this to be implemented? Will there be separate organizational Units for companies, series, divisions etc? How will they be organized? How do we, for example, distinguish between a group that represents a division from a group that represents a unit? Will there be a certain naming convention or a certain property we can use to identify that? Provide as much detail as you can.

Comments

You answered my question; I'd already started down the path you suggested because I couldn't see another way to solve the problem. I added a "before update" PS script to verify that the attendant selected was associated with the selected company. I plan to write a "post update" PS script to handle the hierarchy parenting because each child should be a member of the parent group.

Thanks,
Robert