Frontend Users

"Frontend users" (or local Curator users) are how your various platforms are brought together for the individual frontend experiences. They are matched up by leveraging the username, so it's important to have these names match across your various connected systems.

The list of frontend users can be found at your Curator Backend > Settings > Users > Frontend Users. There should be a record for every user that has signed into Curator. If you click into one of these records, it will show you the details about that user, including any connected platform users. You can also see a preview of the user's navigation based on their permissions by clicking the "User Menu Access" button.

Platform Users

"Platform user" is the generic term for the records Curator keeps of users who have been synced from your connected systems (e.g., Tableau users, ThoughtSpot users, etc.). These platform users simply hold synced information from the system that can be leveraged by the frontend user when determining permissions or performing a specific platform action like favoriting or subscribing to a Tableau dashboard.

The list of these users can be found at your Curator Backend > Settings > PlatformName > PlatformName Users. Some systems have multiple records per user if the user has multiple IDs (e.g., Tableau has a user record with unique IDs per site). If you click into one of these records, it will show you the details about that user. You can sync the specific platform user from this page, too.

Frontend Groups

"Frontend groups" are created locally on Curator and are used for functionalities like restricting access to navigation items or overriding frontend styles based on group membership. These groups can be found at your Curator Backend > Settings > Users > Frontend Groups.

Membership can be built by manually selecting users to be in the group or by choosing a group (or multiple groups) from another platform (or multiple platforms). If a group from another platform is chosen, that membership will automatically be reflected in the frontend group. For instance, if you create a group called "Tableau Users" and choose the "All Users" group from your Tableau Server's default site, then every user who logs in that has a Tableau user from that site will be automatically added to the "Tableau Users" frontend group. You could then use that group in an override to show Tableau users a unique homepage.

User and Membership Syncing

Curator has to make API calls to your various platforms to keep the platform user info up to date. This happens when a user logs into Curator to ensure they have the most current information. At the same time, Curator will check if the user is in any platform groups that are associated with a frontend group and update the membership.

Curator also has the option to run a scheduled group sync for all frontend groups. The settings for this can be found at your Curator Backend > Integrations > Global Settings. By default you can keep this set to "Never" as the membership is updated on login.

Sometimes, the login process can be slow because the platform takes a while to respond with the group information. If this is the case, there is a feature to disable the group membership sync on login (also located in Integrations > Global Settings) called "Skip User Group Sync on Login." If this feature is enabled, the membership sync will be skipped and only the platform user sync will occur (this tends to be universally quick across systems). Having this feature enabled will also create new users when the scheduled group sync is ran to ensure they will already be in their groups when they first login to Curator.

Note: We recommend not disabling the on-login membership sync unless the Curator login process is very slow. Allowing the sync to happen on login ensures the most current membership for your users.

Note: If you disable the on-login sync you also need to ensure a scheduled group sync is configured to run. Ideally, you should do this during low usage hours (e.g., midnight) to ensure group membership is fully synced by the time users log in.