Many-to-One Relationship Fails with Restricted Permissions & Need Conditional Field Access

Help
,
1

I’m facing a permission issue with a many-to-one relationship and would like to know if there’s a recommended approach to handle this.

Scenario

  • I have a courses collection with a many-to-one relationship to a students collection (courses.student).

  • Access to the students collection is restricted for certain users.

Problem

  • When users don’t have read permission on students, the relation field in courses shows a “relationship not configured” error.

  • If I grant read access to students, the relation works—but users can then see all fields from the students collection.

Requirement

I need to achieve the following:

  1. A user should be able to see all fields of their own student record.

  2. For other students, they should only see limited fields (e.g., first_name, last_name).

  3. The relation field (courses.student) should work without errors.

Challenge

From what I understand, field-level permissions in Directus apply at the role level, so:

  • If I restrict fields → it affects even the user’s own record.

  • If I allow full access → it exposes all fields for all students.

Question

Is there a way in Directus to:

  • Apply conditional field-level visibility (full access for own record, limited for others), or

  • Properly handle this use case without duplicating collections or breaking the relationship field?

If not, what would be the recommended pattern for this kind of requirement?

Thanks in advance!