nowdatabase/documentation/entities/people.md

People

People represent contributors, coordinators, contacts, and optionally application users. A person can exist without a login account.

Database model

The main person record is com_people:

• initials (primary key)
• first_name
• surname
• full_name
• format
• email
• user_id
• organization
• country
• password_set
• used_morph
• used_now
• used_gene

If user_id is set, it links the person to a com_users row:

• user_id (primary key)
• user_name
• password
• newpassword
• last_login
• now_user_group
• mor_user_group
• gen_user_group

Person initials are also used in coordinator, authorizer, contact, and membership relations, including project people, region coordinators, species coordinators, stratigraphy coordinators, and update-log coordinator/authorizer fields.

API endpoints

• GET /person/all: list all people; admin-only
• GET /person/:id: read person details; admin users can read any person and non-admin users can read only their own person record
• PUT /person: update a person; admin users can update any person and non-admin users can update only their own person record

Creating new people is not implemented through PUT /person; the route returns an error when initials is missing.

Frontend usage

• /person shows the people table for admins.
• /person/:id? shows person details when the signed-in user is authorized.
• Person lookup data is reused by coordinator/contact selectors, such as project and region editing.

Permission notes

The person routes intentionally do not use only the shared role middleware because self-service profile access is allowed. Route-level checks compare req.user.initials with the requested or edited person initials.

Admin-only user-group edits are handled during person update when the payload includes a valid user_id and now_user_group.