Appearance
Departments
A department groups tracker groups so that a team sees its own work first. Maintenance sees the plant; Stores sees the consumables; Transport sees the fleet.
What a department is
A lens. It changes how things are arranged in front of you.
What a department is not
A department is not a permission
Putting a tracker group into a department does not give that department's members access to it, and taking it out does not remove access.
Access comes from the whitelist and only from the whitelist. This is the single most common misunderstanding about Trackapt's access model, and getting it backwards leads people to think data is protected when it is not, or that somebody has been locked out when they have merely been un-filed.
Where departments show up
- Departments in the sidebar — the department view of your groups.
- Form entries. A form template belongs to a department, and its entries are reached through it. This is why the Submissions menu nests entries under a department rather than listing them flat: reaching an entry needs both the department and the template.
- Group settings. A group names the departments it appears under.
Assigning a group to departments
On the group's settings, alongside Access. The two sit next to each other and do different jobs:
| Setting | Job |
|---|---|
| Access | Who may see this group's data. The real control. |
| Departments | Where this group appears. Display only. |
A group can appear under more than one department.
How the link is actually made
A group and a department are joined from both sides: the department lists the group, and the group names the department. The lens matches either one, so a group filed from one side alone still appears — drift must never hide data.
Consequences worth knowing:
A new group is filed only where you file it. It does not inherit the departments of whoever created it. If you create a group and it appears under nothing, that is correct — name its departments on its settings.
A form reading from a group does not file that group. A form's repeating section names the tracker group its rows come from, and that is a reading relationship, not a filing decision. A group filed under Stores but read by a Workshop form stays under Stores.
A Global Metrics group in no department appears under every lens. It holds no items of its own and aggregates figures from parameters in other groups, which can sit in any department. Left unfiled, it is read as cross-departmental and picking a department never makes it disappear — the right setting for, say, an operations total drawn from every department's spending.
A Global Metrics group filed under departments behaves like any other group. Where its formulas draw on one department's parameters alone, file it under that department from its settings and it shows only while that department is in focus. Filing still says nothing about access: who may open the group is decided by its Access setting and member list, exactly as for every group.