# Show different controls by role

> Use a Role Section to show different content to different roles on the same position, and preview what each role sees. Pro and Enterprise only.

A Role Section is a section type that swaps its own contents depending on which role the current user is identified as: useful when the same position should look different for a director than for a camera operator, without building and maintaining two separate positions. Important Role Sections are available on Pro and Enterprise licenses only. A Role Section decides what to show by identifying who is using the panel, and identity-based section authentication is a Pro and Enterprise feature. On other license tiers, Role Section doesn't appear in the canvas's Create... menu (and its shortcut, O , does nothing), and the editor's View as role and Simulate NFC controls aren't shown. Before you begin A Pro or Enterprise license. At least one Role already created: see Create roles and assign permissions . A way for users to identify themselves at the panel, such as sign-in or NFC: see Set up PIN and NFC sign-in . A sense of which distinct views different roles actually need: a Role Section works best with a small number of clearly different views, not one per individual user. Add role views to a section Select an area of the canvas, right-click, and choose Create... → Role Section (shortcut O ). You can also add one inside a shared section or a cuelist. In the inspector, open the Navigation tab and find Role views : it starts empty, with No role views and "Add a role view to choose which roles can see its contents." Select Add role view , choose one or more roles for it, and select Create role view . Build that view's contents as you would any other section. Repeat for each distinct view you need. Each view is automatically labeled from the roles assigned to it (for example, "Director + Camera Op"); you can also give it its own icon and border color to make it easy to tell apart while editing. While editing, the picker in the section's label bar on the canvas chooses which view you're looking at and building. Besides each view, it also lists Locked and Role view selector , so you can check what the section shows before anyone has identified and when someone matches more than one view. To change a view's roles later, use its Edit roles action. Its context menu also offers Duplicate , Rename , and Delete : deleting a view removes any items that only exist on that view, so move anything you want to keep to another view first. Choose how identification works A Role Section's Authentication Mode , on its Authentication tab, is limited to the two role-based modes also available on other sections: User role : require one of the roles assigned to a view. User role + PIN : require one of those roles, plus the identified user's personal PIN. See Protect critical controls when needed for how identification itself happens (login, NFC, and so on): a Role Section reuses that same mechanism and adds role-matching on top. Understand what a user actually sees If no role view has any roles assigned at all yet, the section renders completely empty: there's nothing to gate on. Before anyone has identified, the section is locked and shows a button for identifying, such as an ID button for an NFC card. Once a user is identified, Buttons checks their roles against every view's assigned roles: No match : the section stays empty and identification resets, as if no one had identified yet. Exactly one match : that view's contents display directly. More than one match (the user holds roles tied to several different views): Buttons shows a picker with one button per matching view, plus a way to log out, so the user chooses which view to enter. On a Stream Deck Studio, the same section goes through these states as people identify with their NFC cards: For a user who matched more than one view, the button in the section's top-right cell first returns from the chosen view to the picker. Pressing it again in the picker signs out, and the section locks again. Preview a role's view while building While editing a position, use View as role (the eye button in the toolbar) to see the canvas as a specific role would see it, without actually signing out and back in as that role. Default returns to your own roles. The ring button next to it, Simulate NFC , simulates a card read for the role you picked. This is an editor-only preview: it has no effect on how real devices evaluate identification, and doesn't change what's actually stored. How this relates to Roles and Permissions A Role Section draws its list of roles from the same Roles you manage in Create roles and assign permissions , but assigning a role to a view is a separate, independent thing from that role's resource permissions (its Read/Update/Delete grants on positions, connections, and so on). Giving a role access to a view only controls what that role can see here; it doesn't grant or depend on any CRUD permission. Conversely, who can edit the section itself (open the position, shared section, or cuelist it lives in) is governed entirely by the normal permission grants, not by the section's own role-view assignments. There's no separate way to sign in as a specific user to confirm their exact effective access: outside of the editor's View as role preview, the only way to confirm what a real user sees is to have them (or you, temporarily holding that role) actually sign in. If you get stuck What you see What to try Role Section is missing from the Create... menu, or View as role is missing from the toolbar. Role Sections need a Pro or Enterprise license: check your license tier under Settings → License . The section is completely empty for everyone. Confirm at least one role view has roles assigned: an unassigned Role Section always renders empty. A user sees nothing after identifying. Their roles don't match any role view's assigned roles: check which roles they actually hold against each view's Edit roles list. A user with two roles gets a picker instead of their view directly. That's expected when their roles match more than one view: they choose which one to enter. You want to confirm what a specific person will see. Use View as role during editing for a quick check, or have that person actually sign in for a fully accurate result: there's no admin "sign in as" feature. Where to go next Create roles and assign permissions Set up PIN and NFC sign-in Organize controls in a section