Controlling report output based on current user

Question

Hi all,
I am building a small app with APEX for a sales team.
We have the site and app hosted by another company.
I have built a report showing sales summary for the company. The problem is that the report is showing all sales for all sales people.
What I want is for the report to show data based on the user that is logged in, so that the user only sees his items.
In fact, this would be a useful thing to learn for me, because I could use this functionality on several other pager, so this will be a good example for other situations.
So far I have:
I have a database table that keeps track of the sales reps.
Each sales rep in that table is assigned a unique EMP_id, which is an autonumber column of that table, and is also the primary key.
The table also contains a column named: "User login Name" which is their login ID (the one they use to log into the application.
Possible solution (I think):
when user logs into APEX, retrieve their EMP_id from the EMP table based on their login name,
Hold the EMP_id in a variable for the duration of the session,
pass the variable to the SQL query for the report in the where clause.
Is this a good solution? or is there a better way to do this?
Can anyone advise on how to get this done please,
Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi,
Sorry - I guess I should have said where to create the function!
You can keep those steps or keep with your own method as both should return the value you need. I usually store the result of that value in G_USER - similar to Tyson's method - when the user logs in and then use :G_USER wherever I want to use it in filters etc. However, if I need to create SQL Views, I have to use the GETCURRENTUSERID() function instead.
Andy
ps - I used MIN() in the function to ensure that I only get one value returned. The method SELECT .... INTO .... only allows us to set a variable to one value and, sometimes, more than one value is returned by the SELECT statement and this would generate an error. Of course, there should be just the one value that matches the current user, but I always assume the worst! The statementS:
SELECT MIN(EMP_ID) into user_id FROM S_USERS WHERE UPPER(LOGIN_ID) = UPPER(v('APP_USER'));
user_id := CASE WHEN user_id IS NULL THEN 9999999999 ELSE user_id END;could also be written as:
SELECT EMP_ID into user_id FROM S_USERS WHERE UPPER(LOGIN_ID) = UPPER(v('APP_USER')) AND ROWNUM = 1;
user_id := CASE WHEN user_id IS NULL THEN 9999999999 ELSE user_id END;or
SELECT NVL(MIN(EMP_ID), 9999999999) into user_id FROM S_USERS WHERE UPPER(LOGIN_ID) = UPPER(v('APP_USER'));