Reading a field value of a collection that is related to my user collection

I have a

collection and an

collection. The

collection is a profile that I use for the writers/editors, where public details they wish to attach to their Posts are stored (such as the email they wish to advertise, bio, website/socials, etc.). The

collection has a relationship field called

which relates to the

collection. This allows an editorial profile to be ‘connected’ to a user account. (Not all users of the Payload admin panel are writers/editors).

The

field gets optionally filled with one of the users from the

collection. When the

field is filled and saved, it updates a field in the

collection called

with the ID of the editorialStaff profile. I've attached simplified screenshots of my

config to show it's fields (and to save on characters).

I am trying to allow certain people access to things who have the ‘editor’ role in the

field of their corresponding editorial profile. I am trying to get the

field from their

(haven’t had an issue with), and then query the

collection for an

with the ID of the

field, and return the roles in this

collection item.

I am wondering what would be the recommended way to do this? I don’t want have everything in the

collection and throw out the

collection even if it would make querying a little easier, as information in the

collection will grow and should be separate from the

collection. When I look at the API for a user, I can see that by setting depth to 1, the information from the related

collection is visible. I haven’t been able to isolate the roles though of the corresponding

collection using the

Local API, and am not sure how to isolate these roles.

Reading a field value of a collection that is related to my user collection

I've managed to get something working, although TypeScript is giving out to me for it and I understand why but am not sure how to fix it.

This piece of code is

:

import type { User, EditorialStaff } from '../../payload-types'

export const checkEditorialRole = (allRoles: EditorialStaff['roles'] = [], user?: User): boolean => {
  if (user) {
    if (
      allRoles.some((role) => {
        return user?.editorialProfile?.roles?.some((individualRole) => {
          return individualRole === role
        })
      })
    )
      return true
  }
  return false
}

This piece of code is

:

import { AccessArgs } from 'payload/config'
import { checkEditorialRole } from '../collections/editorialStaff/checkEditorialRole'

import type { User } from '../payload-types'

type isRole = (args: AccessArgs<unknown, User>) => boolean

export const isEditor: isRole = ({ req: { user } }) => {
  return checkEditorialRole(['editor'], user)
}

I can import isEditor into the collections I want to manage access for for editors. TypeScript has underlined

in the line of code

from the first block of code, stating that "Property 'roles' does not exist on type 'string | EditorialStaff'". I can understand why it says this, and having generated types to make sure that payload-types.ts is up to date, I don't quite know why it works while TypeScript is giving out.

I've managed to piece together a solution that works without any TypeScript issues. It seems I was overthinking things regarding the Local API when I could use it to fetch data on an item in a collection, then select the data I want from it separately.

This is the code for

:

import { AccessArgs } from 'payload/config'
import { checkEditorialRole } from '../collections/editorialStaff/checkEditorialRole'

import type { User } from '../payload-types'

type isEditorialRole = (args: AccessArgs<unknown, User>) => Promise<boolean>

export const isEditor: isEditorialRole = ({ req: { user } }) => {
  return checkEditorialRole(['editor'], user)
}

This is the code for

:

import payload from 'payload'

import type { User, EditorialStaff } from '../../payload-types'

export const checkEditorialRole = async (allRoles: EditorialStaff['roles'] = [], user?: User): Promise<boolean> => {
  if (user) {
    // Get the editorialStaff doc that relates to the current user
    const findEditorialProfile = await payload.find({
      collection: 'editorialStaff',
      where: {
        'mapToUserAccount': {
          equals: user.id
        }
      }
    })
    // Access the doc and isolate the roles
    const editorialRoles = findEditorialProfile.docs[0].roles;
    if (
      // If, out of all the roles submitted into the function, one of them matches with 
      // one of the roles in the user's editorialStaff profile, return true
      allRoles.some((role) => {
        return editorialRoles.some((individualRole) => {
          return individualRole === role
        })
      })
    ) {
      return true;
    } else {
      // otherwise, return false
      return false;
    }
  }
  // If no user is logged in return false
  return false
}

Regarding the TypeScript underlining of

in the line of code

that I was having issues with before, I've managed to fix it with the code below (although I prefer to use the Local API from above as it's easier to understand):

export const checkEditorialRole = async (allRoles: EditorialStaff['roles'] = [], user?: User): Promise<boolean> => {
  if (user) {

    // Get the editorialStaff doc ID that relates to the current user
    const editorialProfileID = 
    // Make sure user.editorialProfile exists and is not a string (aka not just an ID),
    // so the id of the EditorialStaff (type) object can be accessed
    user.editorialProfile && typeof user.editorialProfile !== 'string'
    ? user.editorialProfile.id
    : null;

    if (editorialProfileID !== null) {
      // Get the editorialStaff doc that relates to the current user via ID
      const editorialProfileContent = await payload.findByID({
        collection: 'editorialStaff',
        id: editorialProfileID,
        depth: 1,
      });
      // Access the doc and isolate the roles of the 
      // editorialStaff doc that relates to the current user
      const editorialRoles = editorialProfileContent.roles;
      if (
        // if, out of all the roles submitted into the function,
        // one of them matches with one of the roles in the
        // user's editorialStaff profile, return true
        allRoles.some((role) => {
          return editorialRoles.some((individualRole) => {
            return individualRole === role
          })
        })
      ) {
        return true
      } else {
        // otherwise, return false
        return false
      }
    } else {
      // Handle the case where editorialProfile is null
      return false
    }
  }
  // If no user is logged in return false
  return false
}