About SAK-50993 - Hidden resources linked from Lessons
Daniel Merino
After migrating to Sakai 25 and applying several patches of 25.1, we have some concerns about the change in behavior of Resources and Lessons made in SAK-50993. I apologize if this change has been discussed previously in some T&L meetings where I couldn't participate.
SAK-50993 applies access control to resources loaded from Lessons so if students can't see a file in Resources, they cannot see it in Lessons either. I like this change and I think it's the correct behavior, however there are some big issues:
1) Lessons has always worked in the opposite way and have bypassed hidden access of linked resources. It was built to do that. In the LessonBuilderAccessService.java code there are comments like this one.
// availability is for hidden and release date. Do our own, because
// we implement release date but ignore hidden. That lets faculty hide
// resources from normal view but still see them through Lessons
2) There are two properties in sakai.properties file: "lessonbuilder.basefolder" and "lessonbuilder.folder.hidden". The first one puts all files loaded into Lessons in a specific folder instead of in Resources parent folder. And the second property by default is false, but if it's set to true (as we have) this folder is hidden by default. Note that it is "hidden", not "hidden with accessible contents".
So after years of this workflow we have hundreds of sites with hidden folders used by Lessons. And after applying SAK-50993 we have a lot of complaints of teachers because files linked from their Lessons pages have stopped working for students.
As I said, I like the change of SAK-50993 and I would like to keep it permanently, but I think that some actions are required to avoid future migration issues.
1) Change the property "lessonbuilder.folder.hidden" behavior so the folders are created with "hidden with accessible contents" in Resources instead of just "hidden". Hidden has no sense with the current change.
2) Modify the code or create a script to update existing Lessons base folders from "hidden" to "hidden with accessible contents", so Lessons links are not broken after this change.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards.
-- Daniel Merino Echeverría daniel...@unavarra.es Gestor de E-learning - Centro Superior de Innovación Educativa. Tfno: 948-168489 - Universidad Pública de Navarra.
Jennifer Loudiana
Was SAK-50993 back ported to 23? We have noticed that files are not hidden and accessible as in #2 which is new behavior. We have to manually go in and change those folders when we find the items are not working and they are in Resources and this seems to be for any hidden folder not just those loaded to Lessons.
From: sakai...@apereo.org <sakai...@apereo.org>
On Behalf Of Daniel Merino
Sent: Friday, October 3, 2025 3:18 AM
To: saka...@apereo.org; sakai-user <sakai...@apereo.org>; horn...@plu.edu
Subject: [sakai-user] About SAK-50993 - Hidden resources linked from Lessons
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Sean Horner
Hello Daniel and Jennifer,
Sorry for the disruption that the change associated with SAK-50993 induced, which by itself only affected Lessons. Yes, this change was merged to 23.x.
My recollection or at least impression was that Lessons was supposed to honor the Resources setting for “hidden” (as in “Hide this folder and its contents”) though I concede to having been mistaken. And I was likewise not aware of the properties, lessonbuilder.basefolder and lessonbuilder.folder.hidden (now being addressed with SAK-52030), in part due to our institution’s use of their default settings.
That said, the “Availability and Access” user interface in Resources > Edit Details does not indicate that the Lessons tool’s behavior is an exception to “Hide this folder and its contents”, nor would such an exception necessarily be intuitive, which is why I reported SAK-50993 as a bug (and reasons likely also behind Daniel’s stated concurrence with the direction of this change despite the unanticipated disruption it entailed).
Part of the context of this change pertains to confusions at our institution that were induced by the complexity of having to also account for permissions in Resources-- (e.g., instructors trying to hide contents by revoking the “Read resources” permission for the Student role, including the ‘locking’ of Resources via Site Info > Tool Order)-- and my attempts to manage this complexity while simultaneously meeting the following use cases for how instructors can/should hide content in Resources:
Uploaded content in Resources to be secured only for TA and/or co-instructor access.
Uploaded content to be shared with students via Lessons and other means but not via a folder in Resources where there may exist lots of extraneous files (clutter) imported from prior sites.
The code change in SAK-50993 solely addressed the first use case above. I had filed that jira somewhat coincidentally (soon after) SAK-50984, both of which pertained to the aforementioned complexity of access/hiding issues.
Besides moving forward with SAK-52030, I assume that some comments in LessonBuilderAccessService.java should be revised to no longer contradict the more intuitive behavior of enforcing hidden settings in Resources and likely should have a jira created for that objective (if not already incorporated within another jira).
Sean