Sitecore non administrator user show hidden items - sitecore

Question

I have created some Sitecore users who are not administrators and assigned them few roles. When these users access the Sitecore portal as default they are not shown hidden items and they have to go to view tab and configure it manually. Is there a way I can configure these users to view hidden items by default by doing some configurations to a user role shared between these users.

Answer 1

This information is retrieved by Sitecore.Shell.UserOptions.View.ShowHiddenItems property which gets this data from UserProfile (or from RegistryCache if the profile was already loaded).
User profile information is stored for every user separately and saved in database in binary column. There is no way of getting this option from user role.
Still you can write a script that will loop through all users in the role you mentioned and set the value in profile of those users:
public static void SetHiddenItemsValue(User user)
{
string key = "/Current_User/UserOptions.View.ShowHiddenItems";
string value = "true";
if (!(user != null))
return;
key = StringUtil.Left(key, 250);
key = key.Replace("Current_User", user.Name);
user.Profile[key] = value;
user.Profile.Save();
RegistryCache registryCache = CacheManager.GetRegistryCache(Sitecore.Context.Site);
if (registryCache == null)
return;
registryCache.Clear();
}

Answer 2

An alternative option from Maras is you could possibly hook into the security:loggedin event and set that value.
Your class needs to inherit from Sitecore.Pipelines.LoggedIn.LoggedInProcessor
That'll need to do something like the following:
public override void Process(LoggedInArgs args)
{
var user = Sitecore.Security.Accounts.User.FromName(args.Username, true);
var key = "/" + args.Username + "/UserOptions.View.ShowHiddenItems";
// if user needs to be in a specific role only, check that here
// if (user.IsInRole("yourrolename"))
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(user.Profile[key]))
{
user.Profile[key] = "true";
user.Profile.Save();
}
}