Inheriting Access Control from Folders (Including Nested Folders) to Collection Items

[konstantinkreft]

Hi Payload team and community,

I noticed that Payload recently added support for folders with access control. That’s awesome and potentially exactly what I need! I'm working on a Payload project and looking for advice on how to implement role-based access control at the item level — using the new folder system as the basis for access.

Here’s a example use case:

• I have a collection called Projects.
• Each project belongs to a folder.
• Folders have their own access control — which is great!
• On the folders there is a requiredRoles select field.
• I want projects to inherit access rights from their folder.
• Folders can also be nested, so a folder may have a parent folder, which may also have a parent, and so on.

What I want to achieve:

• Access to a project should be allowed only if the user has access to its folder — or any of its parent folders.
• In other words, access control should recursively resolve up the folder hierarchy.
• This way, I can assign access at a high-level folder and automatically apply it to all subfolders and their projects.

My questions:

• Is it possible to implement this inheritance pattern with Payload’s current access control system?
• Can I resolve and evaluate the full parent folder tree inside a collection item’s access function?
• Is there a recommended or efficient way to model this recursion?
• Will this scale with many nested folders and documents, or is there a performance concern?

Would love to hear how others have tackled similar problems, or any guidance from the team.
Also open to suggestions if there's a more idiomatic way to implement this in Payload.

Thanks in advance for your help! 🙏