Drupal admin: displaying user roles on the account edit page

Submitted by fgm on Wed, 2005-08-24 08:52

Some sites may wish to display to users what their roles are. Here is a small module allowing just this.

Drupal user roles are typically seen only by the administrator when editing a user's account. As of 4.6.3, there seems to be no simple way to have them displayed to user when they access their own information in a theme- and theme-engine-independent way (a PHPtemplate-dependent trick is explained on drupal.org).

So the simplest way appears to be a module implementing hook_user. This can be added to an existing module, or coded on its own. In this case the code is supposed to be implemented as csroles.module, meaning it is in a module of its own that has to be activated from http://www.example.com/admin/modules

<?php
// $Id: csroles.module,v 0.1 2005/08/24 00:41:00 FG Marand $
// Sample code due for the upcoming OSInet helpdesk support module for Drupal
function csroles_help ($section = '') 
  {
  $output = '' ;
  switch ($section)
    {
    // The description found on the admin/system/modules page.
    case "admin/modules#description": 
      $output = t ("Allows for the display of an user's roles on their profile page") ;
      break;

    // The module's help text, displayed on the admin/help page 
    // and through the module's individual help link.
    case "admin/help#customersupport":
      $output = t ("Allows for the display of an user's roles on their profile page") ;
      break ;
    }
  return $output;
  }

function csroles_user ($op, &$edit, &$user, $category = NULL)
  {
  $ret = NULL ;
  switch ($op)
    {
    case 'view':
      {
      $ret =  array ('account' => t('Personal information'))     ;
      break ;
      }
    case 'categories':
      {
      $ret = array
        (
        array (
          "name"   => "csroles",
          "title"  => "user roles",
          "weight" => 1)
          ) ;
      break ;
      }
    case 'form':
      {
      // When user tries to edit his own data:
      if ($category == 'csroles') // default: account
        {
        $ret = array
          (
          array
            (
            'title' => 'You have been assigned roles:',
            'data'  => '<ul><li>' . implode ('</li><li>', $edit ['roles'])
                     . '</li></ul>',
            'weight'=> 0,
            )
          ) ;
        }
      }
    }
  return $ret ;
  }
?>

For site admins wishes to display the same information in a block without adding a module to an already overloaded site, there is a shorter way: create a custom block in http://www.example.com/admin/block/add, setting the input filter to PHP code, and type:

<?php
global $user ;

print ("<ul>\r\n") ;
foreach ($user->roles as $role)
  {
  print ("  <li>$role</li>\r\n") ;
  }
if ($user->uid == 1)
  print ("  <li><em>sysop</em></li>\r\n") ;
print ("  </ul>\r\n") ;
?>

Tagged for drupal, sample code, and user roles in Technorati.

Add new comment

Is it possible to display

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2007-02-19 01:58.

Is it possible to display the user's role in a block but not display "authenticated user"?

Don't display 'authenticated user'

Submitted by fgm on Mon, 2007-02-19 09:45.

It's quite simple: just test for that string in the foreach loop:

<?php
global $user ;

print ("<ul>\r\n") ;
foreach ($user->roles as $role)
  {
  if ($role != 'authenticated user') // mask that role 
    {
    print ("  <li>$role</li>\r\n") ;
    }
  }
if ($user->uid == 1)
  {
  print ("  <li><em>sysop</em></li>\r\n") ;
  }
print ("  </ul>\r\n") ;
?>

display user access

Submitted by shah (not verified) on Thu, 2009-08-06 12:47.

I would like to display all the common pages and modules, to which the user has access, based on his roles. How do i accomplish it.

Thanks
Shah

Basically you don't

Submitted by fgm on Sun, 2009-08-09 10:38.

Due to the menu inheritance system, that list would basically be infinite, or very large, since any path with additional components to a valid path is also a valid path.

So you probably want to only display part of that list of paths (pages). The question then becomes : exactly which pages would you display in that list ? If it's nodes, it can still be a very long list, as you can have up to 4 billion nodes on a Drupal 6 site.