How to have an email link that accesses APEX page w/o logging in again.

Question

Greetings,
It is common in our APEX applications to send email to a user with a link to a specific row of data so they may access the row and approve it. The user who gets the email is already logged into the application, but when they click on the link in their email they are prompted to log in. How do I get around this?
Thanks, Tony
Edited by: cloaked on Jul 5, 2012 2:47 PM

Answer 1

What you need is a custom page sentry setup which detects if there is an already valid session and then uses that.
See {thread:id=2283805} for a fantastic example by Patrick Wolf about page sentry functions. You will need to alter it to retrieve a valid session, through apex_custom_auth.get_session_id.
For some more pointers, take a look at these blog posts
http://joelkallman.blogspot.be/2010/10/custom-authentication-scheme-for-oracle.html
http://zetetic.net/blog/2010/12/10/updating-page-sentry-for-apex-40-upgrade.html
http://timnzblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/application-express-and-janrain/
(example code taken from last blog:)
FUNCTION PAGE_SENTRY
RETURN BOOLEAN
IS
    l_username VARCHAR2(512);
    l_session_id NUMBER;
BEGIN
    IF USER != 'APEX_PUBLIC_USER' THEN
        RETURN false;
    END IF;
     l_session_id := wwv_flow_custom_auth_std.get_session_id_from_cookie;
     -- check application session cookie.
     IF wwv_flow_custom_auth_std.is_session_valid THEN
         apex_application.g_instance := l_session_id;
         l_username := wwv_flow_custom_auth_std.get_username;
         wwv_flow_custom_auth.define_user_session(
             p_user => l_username, p_session_id => l_session_id);
         RETURN true;
     ELSE
         OWA_UTIL.REDIRECT_URL('f?p=RPXAUTH:LOGIN:'||
             nv('APP_SESSION')||
             '::::RETURN_APP_ID,RETURN_PAGE_ID:'||
             v('APP_ID')||
             ','||v('APP_PAGE_ID'));
     END IF;
     RETURN false;
END page_sentry;Perhaps others have more recent links, but this is the direction you should be looking at. I haven't set this up myself yet though, so i can't really be of much more assistance on this.