On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:07:44 +0100 Sjøholt Steinar Otto ssj@hials.no wrote:

There seem to be a bug somewhere i NAV 3.5.2 that requires the user to be member of the "NAV administrators" group to be able to receive SMS messages from NAV.

A regular user with access only to specific parts of the NAV interface (including membership in the "SMS" group that gives "alert_by for sms" privileges) never recieves any SMS alerts, even if the "Alert profiles" account details informs the user that "You have permission to be alerted by SMS"...

*sigh*

You are indeed correct, Steinar. I've been looking into this today, and it seems like we uncovered a snake's nest of issues here.

The core of your problem is that the new alert engine looks for the wrong privilege name when it attempts to verify that a user has the SMS privilege. This doesn't matter for admin users, though, as they are granted any privilege that is asked for. Bug reported and fix committed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nav/+bug/348892

But a non-admin user will still not receive any alerts, not even by e-mail - because NAV's default is to grant alert privileges only to admin users. I've found that this has actually been the case as long as NAV 3 has existed. But it seems the old Alert Engine in NAV versions prior to 3.5 did not enforce these privileges at all, neither did it enforce the SMS privilege - so this problem was never detected.

So now I thought it would be easy to fix this by adding the "G01: All alerts" group to the privilege list of the group "Authenticated users". But that's when I discovered a bug in Alert Profiles' Permissions page. It crashes as soon as you attempt to view the permissions of any group, because of a silly typo. So I fixed the typo, but I was still unable to save any changes in the permissions - my changes just disappeared. Turned out to be another similar typo, which I also fixed. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/nav/+bug/348853 .

You are probably the first to discover these issues because many NAV ops just set up admin access for all their users. Looks like version 3.5.3 is not that far away.