New: Hierarchical Group Selection in Data Lookup Gadgets
You can now select Groups from within your organizational blueprint hierarchy in a single lookup.
Form designers can enable a new setting—“Choose from this Blueprint or any of its parents”—on either a Lookup (List) or Lookup (Multiselect) gadget when they're pointed at the Data Source of Kuali Groups. This allows form fillers to search and select Groups not just from the configured Blueprint, but also from any parent Blueprint that is above that Group in the hierarchy.
Why This Matters
Organizations don’t operate at just one level. Groups (aka Units) might be a department, college, center, or central office. With hierarchical selection, your forms now reflect that reality—without requiring multiple gadgets or complex configurations.
What’s Improved
- Flexible Group selection: Choose Groups from a Blueprint or any of its parent levels.
- Smarter workflow routing: Steps that don’t apply are automatically skipped based on the selected Group. Skipped steps are recorded in Workflow History.
- More powerful permissions: You can now configure Conditional Permissions using roles from any level in the Blueprint hierarchy. This allows you to base conditional permissions not only on the specific groups selected in the form but also any parent group/role above in the blueprint hierarchy.
- Hierarchy-aware access: Users gain access when their role aligns with the selected Group—or any Group that rolls up to it.
Additional Notes
- Hierarchical permissions update automatically when Group relationships change (for example, after a reorganization).
- A background job ensures permissions stay in sync with hierarchy updates.
- Please note, the background job that updates hierarchical permissions applies to all documents with explicit Blueprint data. To support this, we've run a migration to populate Blueprint information for all Data Lookup (Group) and Data Lookup (Groups) gadgets on existing documents. Due to performance considerations, this migration does not include data-linked Group gadgets. As a result, hierarchical permissions for those scenarios should rely on Group data provided through integrations for documents moving forward.