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User Creation ​

User accounts for both the Mobile App and Administration Website are handled using Meteor's Accounts system and password-based authentication. All existing users are collected in the users collection. There are two types of users: regular users (data field roles of collection users has a value user) and admin users (data field roles of collection users has a value ['user', 'admin']). Regular users can only access the Mobile App, whereas administrator users can access both the Mobile App and the Administration Website.

As we are using Meteor's default account and authentication system, there are currently two ways to create a new user. You can complete this task either through the Administration Website or the Mobile App. Regular users can be created through both the Administration Website and the Mobile App. The creation of user accounts through the Mobile App is currently disabled (commented out in the source code). This is to make sure that no third-parties external to experiments can get access to the app.

Creation of Regular Users ​

Regular users are typically created over the tool for User Creation, after a researcher has decided how many users will participate in the experiment.

Users can also create an account independently through the app. This feature, however, is currently disabled. When creating experiments with this option enabled, we recommend that researchers create a survey for the group default-experiment, where participants need to submit their email address. This then allows for access control over the app.

Creation of Administrator Users ​

Admin users are created manually by developers with access to the MongoDB. For this, a user account must be created through the Mobile App, and consequently, its data fields in the user collection must be manually updated. Specifically, the following fields have to be overwritten:

  • roles: needs to be changed from ['user'] to ['user', 'admin']
  • participatesIn: this is the experiment to which the Mobile App will be connected (if an admin user owns a couple of experiments, only one of them can be shown in the user's Mobile App). Currently, there is an 'admins-experiment', to which this field can be overwritten
  • userGroup: you can assign any group name to the admin user, e.g., DE, if you want to separate researchers according to the country of their university
  • experiments (optional): this field does not have to be overwritten. You can use it to control which experiments an admin user owns, i.e., can see and manipulate, over the Admin Website. An experiment can be owned by multiple admin users. Be careful when allowing research access to other experiments

Creating Administrator Users from the Admin Website ​

The manual process above is no longer the only option. The Administration Website now has an Admins page (visible in the footer navigation only to users holding the Maintainer role) that creates Administrator/Maintainer accounts directly, without touching MongoDB by hand:

  1. Open Admins and enter the new researcher's email address.
  2. Choose their role: Administrator or Maintainer. A Maintainer has the same study access as an Administrator and can additionally manage other researcher accounts and use the maintainer-only parts of the Researcher Data API (e.g. bulk article upload).
  3. Set their participant-account quota (maxUserAccount) — the maximum number of participant accounts this researcher will be able to create across their experiments.
  4. Submit. A random initial password is generated and stored (alongside the quota) on the new account's profile; it's shown in the initial password column of the Admins table so it can be passed on to the new researcher, who should change it on first login.

See Database Collections for the exact profile fields (maxUserAccount, createdAccount, plainTextInitialPassword) this sets.