Discoverer - Dynamic Drill Level puzzle

Question

Hi,
I came across a strange requirement for discoverer reports. The client has a sales organisation hierarchy with levels like country,state, region, city.
1) The first problem is to show the data in the reports according to value of the country, region or city of the user. That is a Manager from country X should be able to see only data from country X. The possible solution for this kind of requirement would be a master table to store mapping of username to their geography. And then at the EUL level, putting mandatory conditions in the report to filter out data. Is there any other better approach possible?
2) The TOUGHER puzzle is same report opening at different level of hierarchy according to the user's position. That is a sales SUM report opens up at country level and shows separate sums of each state under that country head, that can be drilled down to City level. That is two levels of drill down (region, city).
When a State head logs in then he gets the report for sum of sales for each region under that state, that can be drilled futher down to city level (one level of drill down).
Is it possible to open the same report at country, region, state, city level according to the user??
I checked one of the posts from Rod in the message : HR Intelligence - Salary Information - Can we restrict ?
In this he has suggested a very much possible way to replace the item with a custom Item where the actual underlying Item is decided in the DECODE. So in the current puzzle, I can create an Item SALES_AREA which decodes to Country, state, region or city depending on the user. But I don’t know how user friendly it’ll be for super users who want to use all the areas in the same report as different columns.
Is there any other way possible way out for both of the above problems… I know this would be real creative solution to come up with..
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi
We really are only limited by our own imagination when it comes to what can be done inside Discoverer. There are many different ways you can implement what you hve proposed.
Have you considered using a VPD or VPD-like scenario to control what you are asking?
Did you consider using some of the code that I supplied in the same posting you referenced in your original posting? Using this methodology you can use a separate control / bridge table to handle who sees what. Then you create a function of the username / userid. If that function returns true or 1 or yes or whataver you choose, you open up access to the column or row.
The code I supplied can be used to manage both column-based and row-based security such that protected columns like SSN, date of birth, salary are hidden from prying eyes, or where the whole row will only display when a user has the correct clearance. If you've stayed with me and tuned in to my logic, you will be thinking Mandatory Conditions at this point. :-)
I hope this helps
Best wishes
Michael