Overview
An Affiliation is a high level association that is used to group together related Profiles, Log Sources, Users and Groups under a single identifying label, which is typically a corporate or client name. For Urchin installations where there is a need to support multiple complex client organizations, creating an Affiliation allows the Urchin administrator to keep track easily of all the Urchin reporting components for a particular client or corporate entity. Access rights to Urchin reports can be controlled via an Affiliation association, and within an Affiliation even more granular access rights to certain reports can be assigned to Groups or Users, thereby protecting your data as desired at multiple levels. As well, Affiliation level administration rights can be assigned to a user who can then act as a local Urchin administrator for the Affiliation. This allows distribution of the responsibility for managing, configuring, and maintaining the Urchin reports within an Affiliation.
It is important to note that since Affiliations are the highest level organizational "element" in the Urchin administration interface, you should create the Affiliations before you create any Profiles, Log Sources, Users, or Groups that will be associated with the Affiliation. The choice of Affiliation must be made when an Urchin element is created, and it cannot be changed afterwards. At creation time if you do not choose a specific Affiliation the default Affiliation of (NONE) will be set. This tells Urchin that the element in question has no Affiliation.
Creating Affiliations
To create an Affiliation, go to the Configuration->Users & Groups->Affiliation screen and click the Add button. Only the Affiliation Name is required; Contact and Contact Email are not used by Urchin and are strictly informational fields for the benefit of the adminstrator. Report Data Location (optional) specifies where to store the report data for all the Profiles that belong to the Affiliation. The default location is the data/reports directory within the Urchin distribution. Changing the Report Data Location allows you to physically separate within your file system the report data for different organizations. Directory Browsing Location (optional) is provided as a security measure when giving an Affiliation administrator access to create Profiles. A directory entered into this field will limit the Affiliation admin's ability to browse for log files to only that directory. By default, there are no restrictions on where an Affiliation admin can browse for log files.
Using Affiliations
To assign a Profile, Log Source, User, or Group to an Affiliation, use the dropdown menu labeled Optional Affiliation in the initial screen of the setup wizard when creating the given element. Once an Affiliation is assigned to a Profile, Log Source, User, etc., the Urchin admin interface will restrict modification choices to those elements that are associated with the Affiliation. In this way the Affiliation acts to control access rights at a high level so that you can isolate organizations from one another without the need to set specific access permissions on every report.
Affiliations also aid in distributing management reponsibilities for the Urchin configuration. Within an Affiliation, the primary Urchin administrator can assign local admin privileges to Affiliation users. There are three admininstrative levels of control that can be assigned to a User. See the Working with Users & Groups article in this section for details.
When viewing the admin screens for Urchin configuration parameters, you may filter the entries to selectively show only those with a particular Affiliation name by using the Affiliation dropdown menu in the top bar of the table. Although (NONE) means no affiliation, for purposes of filtering (NONE) is shown as an option in the Affilation dropdown so that you may view only entries that are not affiliated.