Mimic Target Audience in SharePoint Foundation

Question

As a preface, I know Foundation does not have audience targeting. But, I do not have an option to upgrade to SharePoint Server. So, with that preface, here is my dillema.

I have two SP groups, groupA and groupB. Both groups have access to list1, and I have a listview web part on a page for the users to query information. I would like to add a second listview web part for list2 on the same page. groupA does have permissions to read from list2 but groupB does not. Because both sets of users have the same roles, SPSecurity Trimming is not an option.

I would like to mimic audience targeting by hiding the listview web part for list2 if the user is not in groupA. Through SPServices I can retrieve a users groups, but I am not sure if there is a better approach to accomplish this task.

Answer 1

TLDR; Use Unique Permissions on the lists, allocated to the groups. If it is for display only, you may consider using search results to display data.

This depends totally if there are any security concerns, or is it just for aesthetics.

If there are security concerns, then you have to take it server side, and create custom view web part for these lists.

However if it is just for aesthetics, you could use JavaScript if you wished.

Another however though, is performance. If you use javascript you are still calling the data.

So taking into consideration everything, the best approach for this scenario is to use unique permissions on the lists. If this is SharePoint 2013 then as long as you are up to date on the October 2013 CU, then you will have minimal performance issues.