Understanding Roles in Glide Apps
Roles are a powerful feature that allows you to control user access to different parts of your app. By assigning roles, you can manage who sees specific data or can perform certain actions. For example:
Admin role: Users with full access to all app data and functionality.
Reader role: Users with limited access, restricted to viewing specific tabs or datasets.
For more detailed guidance on how to set up and use roles in your Glide app, refer to our comprehensive documentation here and YouTube video here.
Supported Data Sources for Roles
Glide initially supported Google Sheets as its primary data source. With Google Sheets, you can implement multiple roles due to the way Glide arrays function within this platform. However, for other data sources—such as Airtable, Microsoft Excel, and SQL—multiple roles are not currently supported.
If you're using one of these alternative data sources and require role-based permissions, we recommend exploring ways to structure your data using Row Owners.
For a practical example, check out this template, where we’ve combined Roles and Row Owners. In this solution, farmers can only view their own farms, while agents have access to multiple farms. You'll need to copy the template into your team to see the details.