Employee objects
Employee configuration maps an M-Files user account to an object in the vault that stands for the person. It is a short section — an object type and the lookup property on it that points at a user — but several features are unavailable without it.
The vault needs the object type and the property before either can be named here. See Vault structure, which also covers why exactly one employee object should point at each user account.
While no employee configuration is set, the application status in M-Files Admin carries a warning recommending one. It is a warning rather than an error: portals still load.
What the mapping is used for
Section titled “What the mapping is used for”Comments link the author’s name to their employee object, so it opens as a real object, on version comments as well, and show the author’s picture when Image property is set. Comment objects go further: they are attributed to an employee object rather than to a user, and posting one, replying and editing all need the employee object of the person doing it.
Other features that act on the current user read the same mapping: calendar event types whose personal relationship points at employee objects, list views grouped by the current employee object, multi view searches limited to the current employee, and plot conditions and SQL parameters that take their value from the current employee.
A column holding a user account in a list view or a plot table is shown as the employee object behind that user rather than as a plain user lookup, so it opens and behaves like any other object reference. For a column that can hold several users, such as Assigned to, only the first user is shown, as their employee object, and the others are left out. If that first user has no employee object, the column shows all its users as plain user lookups.
Avatars
Section titled “Avatars”Image property is optional. It names a text or multi-line text property on the employee object, and what goes in it is the picture itself, encoded as base64. Converters for this are widely available online.
Two forms are accepted. A complete data URI beginning data:image/ is used as it stands.
A bare base64 string is inspected for its first few characters, which is how the type is
established, and only PNG and JPEG are recognised that way — a bare GIF, SVG or WebP falls back
to a placeholder avatar rather than showing.
Keep the picture small. The whole string is stored as a property value on the employee object and fetched once per author, so a full-size photograph costs more than the comment feed it appears in.
Only the comment feed draws avatars. Leaving the property unset costs nothing else.
What the caches mean in practice
Section titled “What the caches mean in practice”The mapping from user to employee object is cached in the vault application. A user who is not in the cache is looked up on demand, and a user with no employee object is remembered as a miss for an hour — so a newly created employee object can take that long to be recognised.
Cache Update Frequency governs a different cache: the list of vault users that @-mention search reads. Raising or lowering it does not affect how quickly a new employee object is picked up. It is also the only schedule that fills that list, and it has no default, whatever its help text below says: until it is set, the list stays empty and @-mention search finds nobody. The User Cache Update operation on the application’s dashboard in M-Files Admin fills it once, by hand.
If the object type or the user property cannot be resolved in the vault — an alias that no longer exists, an object type that was deleted — the cache is not built, and the vault application log says so by name. Correct the references, then restart the vault. Until it restarts, a user already found stays cached, and a user found to have none is remembered that way for an hour. The restart makes every user be looked up afresh.
Settings
Object type
This is the object type that is used for employees.
User property
This is the property that is used to store the user reference.
Image property
This is the property that is used to store the employee's image.
Cache Update Frequency
This is the frequency at which the user cache is updated. Default: Once per hour.
Employee configuration settings, generated from CtrlPortals 3.26.9.53.