Hierarchy in Profile Levels

The hierarchy in profile levels determines the context for making a profile option effective.

You can enable a profile option at the following levels:

• Site level (lowest): The entire site of deployment

• User level (highest): A specific user

After you create or edit a profile option on the Manage Profile Options page, you must enable it. You can enable it at multiple levels. The setting at the highest enabled level takes precedence over the lower levels. User level is the highest in the hierarchy and always takes precedence over the settings at the site level.

On the Manage Administrative Profile Values page, set the profile value at any of the enabled levels of the profile option.

Example of Profile Option Hierarchy

The following table shows an example of setting the currency profile option at different levels.

Profile Level	Hierarchy	Currency
Site	Lowest	Euro
User	Highest	US Dollar

For this example, there are two users, John and Lisa. For John, the user-level profile value currency is set to US Dollar. If the Currency profile option is enabled only at the site level, both John and Lisa would see Euro as the default currency. If the profile option is enabled at the user level, users having a different currency set as their currency profile value would see only that currency. In this case, John would see US Dollar as the default currency. If the Currency profile option is enabled at the user level and there is no user level currency defined, the site level setting takes effect. When both site and user levels are enabled, the value for the user level takes precedence over the site level value.