How To Restrict View of Data Per User

Question

I am designing a reporting application in Discoverer, from Oracle Applications data. We need to show sales data to the sales people - and we would like a single Discoverer workbook to do this - the challenge is that we need to restrict the data so that the salesperson only sees his/her own data, and cannot view other sales data.
I will need to use this same methodology for the sales managers. Each sales manager will only be able to see his/her direct reports' sales data.
How would you design this? Could we use a single Discoverer workbook for all sales people - and there be row-level security to restrict the current users' search results?
Thank you,
Rich Magee
Greenwich, CT

Answer 1

Yes Rich. We have only one workbook for all the stores in our case. You can create mapping table like this
Table Name: usermapping
username salesrepid
john 10
michelle 20
If you are using your own tables/views for your reports create a repid column in them and populate accordingly.Assuming that your custom tables is like this
Table Name: RepInfo
line# salesrepid region product amount
1 10 NE S/W 1000.00
2 20 SW H/W 500.00
Create a function like this
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION setparam (name VARCHAR2)
RETURN NUMBER
IS
BEGIN
/* Setting the session client information to the value of parameter so that this can be accessed
by the custom folder in the admin edition */
dbms_application_info.set_client_info(name);
RETURN 1;
END;
Create a custom folder like
select a.region,a.product,a.amount
from
repinfo a,
usermapping b
where
a.salesrepid = b.salesrepid
and b.username = USERENV('CLIENT_INFO') --gets the username from the above function which sets the username for the database session.
The input to above function which is username would be passed from report using a calculation item.You can create a calculation item and select the function setparam and give the input to it 'USER' variable which is gives the username of the current session.
The workbooks passes the username to function and custom folder would get the username from the function.This approach would allow you to pass the username dynamically and use the same report for all the rep's. I'vent tried VPD concept till now.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Raj