You need some form of mapping

chlab — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:45:24 +0000

You need some form of mapping users to catalogs. How to do this exactly depends on your current environment. Are the users stored in a database? If they are, you would create a new table for catalogs, something like:

catalogs
---------
catalog_id
catalog_name
catalog_filepath

..add any other fields you need to keep track of your catalogs. Then to assign catalogs to users, you would make another table, like:

catalogs_user
---------------
catalogs_user_id
user_id
catalog_id

..in which every record defines 1 access. When a user logs in, you can select from catalogs_user and join the catalogs table, giving you a list of exactly the catalogs that a user has access to. If this isn't making any sense to you, check out a few tutorials on MySQL joins.