The Dalea hierarchy
User → Org → Workspace → Project → everything else.
Almost everything you'll do in Dalea is anchored to a particular workspace, and almost every page in the product follows the same hierarchy. Understanding it once removes a lot of "where did that go?" later.
The data boundary. Documents, data and inventory all live in a workspace.
The four hierarchy layers
- User
- A single person. Email, password or passkey, optional 2FA. Belongs to one or more organisations.
- Organisation
- A billing tier and a member directory. Owns workspaces. Has org-level admins, security policy, and a tier that caps workspaces, seats and storage (Free, Pro 5, Pro 10, Academic, Enterprise).
- Workspace
- The collaboration unit and the data boundary. Documents, environments and inventory all live here. Workspaces don't share data with each other; sharing happens through templates or the marketplace.
- Project
- A grouping inside a workspace: a study, a campaign, a manuscript. Open by default, so every workspace member sees it. A project can instead be set to restricted, which hides the project and its project-scoped data objects from every workspace member except the workspace owner.
The artefacts inside a workspace
- Document
- A collaborative notebook page made of structured blocks (paragraphs, tables, charts, spreadsheets, well plates).
- Folder
- A hierarchical organiser inside a project.
- File
- An uploaded artefact (FASTA, PDB, image, PDF) tied to a document or project.
- Environment
- A schema container — tables, columns, naming schemes — for structured records.
- Object
- An entity registered in an environment: a sample, an animal, a reagent.
- Result
- A measurement record (dimensions × measurements) tied to one or more objects.
- Inventory item
- Something physical: a vial, a plate, an antibody aliquot. A row in an inventory table, tracked through custody states.
- Template
- A reusable document blueprint, optionally locked.
Two practical consequences
If you wouldn't be comfortable having a person see everything in a workspace, they don't belong in it. A separate workspace is the cleanest split, but the number of workspaces an organisation may hold is capped by its tier: Free 1, Pro 5 gets 2, Pro 10 gets 3, Academic 10, Enterprise unlimited. If you are at the cap, use a narrower workspace role instead.
Putting a document in a project does not hide it from other workspace members: document reads are workspace-scoped. But a project set to restricted is a real boundary. It disappears from the project list for everyone but the workspace owner, and its project-scoped data objects are blocked by row-level security. Inventory is unaffected: inventory tables are always workspace-wide, so no inventory row is ever scoped to a project.