Can I control who sees which fields?

A buying question, answered from the code rather than from the brochure · 20 September 2026

This is two questions wearing one coat, and our answers are different. One is a no. It goes first, because it is the one that would hurt you.

Hiding a FIELD from some people: no, and do not rely on it

You can open the field editor and mark a field as restricted to certain roles. Nothing enforces it. Every person who can open a record sees every field on that record. The setting is configurable and inert.

We are not confessing this reluctantly — the editor already tells you, on the same screen, in the same words: field-level restrictions are not enforced anywhere. There is a test in our codebase whose only job is to keep that sentence and that fact together, so nobody can quietly ship the feature halfway and leave the warning behind.

So: do not put salaries, medical notes or disciplinary records in a field and mark it manager-only. It will look protected on the screen where you set it and it will not be. That is the single most expensive way to misread this product, which is why it is at the top of the page rather than in a footnote.

Controlling who sees which RECORDS: yes, and it is real

Access rules live on a collection. They name who can read and who can edit — by person, by group, or by role — and they can depend on a value in the record itself. The sentence people usually want is “each technician sees only the jobs assigned to them”, and that is exactly the shape these rules take.

The part that matters is where it is enforced, because a permission applied by the screen alone is decoration. Here, the rule is worked out once and applied on the record itself, so it holds:

• when the record is opened,
• in every list, view and search result,
• in exports,
• on files attached to the record — a download inherits the record’s readers,
• and when data syncs down to somebody’s laptop, so a record they may not read never arrives on their machine at all.

One rule, one place it is decided, applied by every door. That is the difference between access control and a hidden menu item.

So how do you protect something sensitive?

Give it its own collection. Put the sensitive part — the pay rate, the case notes — in a separate collection linked to the main record, and put the access rules on that one. Record-level rules are enforced, so people without permission simply do not see it: no empty box, no greyed-out field, nothing to work around.

It is one more collection than you were hoping for. It is also the arrangement that actually holds, and we would rather hand you that than a checkbox that makes you feel safe.

One thing that looks like this and is not

Hiding a field hides it from everybody, not from particular people. It is for tidying a form down to what somebody needs to fill in. It is not a security control and it is worth not confusing the two when you are planning.

Being straight about where we are: Bionic Forms is pre-launch. There is no iOS or Android app; the macOS, Windows and Linux desktop builds and the web app are what exist today, the Windows build is not code-signed yet so Windows warns the first time you run it, and we have no external customers to point at. Every claim on this page was read out of our own source code before it was written, including the one that costs us the sale.