How to assign files and documents to a User-account?

Friday 12 March 2010 7:06:12 am

Hi everybody,
I'm currently working on a project, where the client wants resellers to register user-accounts on his website in order to view special product information. That works fine so far. But they need a feature where they can assign bills, reports and other user-related documents (mostly PDFs or MSWord-Docs uploaded by the Admin or Editor) directly to each user-account. Those documents will then be presented as links (e.g. list of related objects) on the user-account page.
This is the idea I prefer the solution to work: simply create my File-Nodes under each User-Node in the tree of the User-Section. Actually, this doesn't work, because I'm restricted to create only Users or User Groups down there. I edited the User-Class to be a container and was able to link sub-nodes from the Media-Section via the placement-feature. But I feel this is a bit cumbersome, as in this case the client needs to maintain an additional, but similar file-structure, which might get messy and prone to errors when many user-accounts are involved. I want to create a solution that's easy to understand and easy to handle for the client. Especially because sensitive information is handled here, I'd like to keep input-errors like incorrect linking of nodes at a minimum.
So, long story short:
1. Is there somewhere a setting to allow sub-nodes to be created under User-Nodes? Can the restriction of only being able to create User and User Groups be relaxed somehow?
2. Alternatively, is it possible to automatically create a "private" folder for each user-account that is somehow hard-linked with the user-account?
3. Do you have an alternative solution to this problem or is there some kind of out-of-the-box solution that i might have overlooked?
Thanks for your help!