Why do my site permissions mean a volunteer user role can see activities in the Activity tab, but then not see them when moved to case?

Question

Civi 5.42 D7

I have set up a case system for our organisation to allow "Volunteer Counsellors" to access civi, see the clients they are allocated to and manage their clients' cases.

The "Volunteer Counsellor" role does not have the blanket view all contacts permissions in civi. I've set up the Counsellor of/ Counsellor is relationship to be permissioned so that the counsellor can see/ edit/manage the details of the client. The Counsellor of/is role is also the Case Manager role in the case. I've set up Drupal ACLs so that the counsellor has access to specific groups of contacts which includes other Service Staff who may interact with the client.

As a counsellor I can log in, find my client in Civi and see activities in the activity tab and view/ edit those added by members of service staff. And tbh, that's what I expect.

Once these activities are "filed on case" by an administrator, they are not visible to the counsellor in the case listing. Although they are visible to those with staff/ admin roles.

I can make these activities visible to the counsellor by adding them as activity assignees.

But I had thought that the permissions for the volunteer counsellor role to be able to see activities in the activity tab, would be sufficient for them to see the same case activity listing.

Is this a known feature? Have I overlooked something

Answer 1

Figured this out after posting the above.

I had originally given the Volunteer Counsellor role the CiviCRM case permission "access my cases and activities". Because one of the requirements for volunteer access to the CRM was that they should not see other contact data beyond their own client list.

I changed this to "access all cases and activities". And the Counsellor user could then see and all the activities within their case, as well as any additional activities on the client's activity tab.

This meant that the volunteer user could then see additional client and case data when they selected "All cases" on the Case Dashboard. Which includes name and phone data for clients involved in cases across the organisation, but following links to case or contact details gave the access denied message- as per their wider site permissions.

So basically I updated the nav menu settings so that volunteer case users just can't see the case menu in Civi, and therefore the case dashboard is hidden from them. (They can see cases they are assigned to in views I've created for this project).

In short, the "my cases and activities" permission gives the user access only to cases they have a role in, and inside that case only the activities they are part of (Target, source, assignee). "all cases and activities" gives access to all cases and all activities within those cases.

Kind of wish there was a "my cases and all activities in my cases" option. But there isn't. But I've kind of created that with the ACL and relationship permissions.