Understanding “Restrict Read” Web Page Access control rule in Dynamics 365 Portals/ PowerApps portals

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“Restrict Read” – A privilege which is perhaps most misunderstood. And every session I go when I start explaining the concept of Restrict Read, participants are like – Come on! This is not what Restrict read means.

To give a quick background we have Web Page Access Control rules and under Web Page access control rules we have Grant Access and Restrict Read. The problem arises with Restrict read.

So let’s create a restrict rule for one of our webpages. The web page name is “Restricted Page”.

Now what happens? The moment I created this Restrict Rule, the Restricted Page along with all the web files under this page (defined by scope), are restricted for all  users in all web roles. In other words, the moment you create a restrict rule for a page, the page is blocked from all portal users. And then you have to assign webroles explicitly to this rule to enable this page only for users in the specific role.

So I go ahead and assign “Employee Web Role” to this rule.

The moment I do this, all users in Employee Web Role shall be able to see the Restricted page. So the gist is –

“When you create a restrict rule for a page, the page is blocked for all. And then you have to assign webroles to this rule to explicitly make this page available to users in that webrole.”

Hope things are clearer if ever you had a doubt about Restrict read.

Hope this helps!

Debajit Dutta

(Microsoft MVP)