Managing Workspace Users

Question

I have been looking back through the apex_util APIs and notice there are a lot of API for managing workspace users. In the past the Apex team have not encouraged the use of Workspace users for application authentication schemes, is this a change in stance or would the team still recommend other authentication schemes?
I notice that the APEX_WORKSPACE_APEX_USERS view does not include the FIRST_NAME, LAST_NAME or the ID of a user. If you wanted to build your own interface to manage workspace users, how would you do this without access to that information? I can see APIs to return the names but how do you determine the ID for a user?
Shunt

Answer 1

Hello Shunt,
>> I can see APIs to return the names but how do you determine the ID for a user?
The apex_util API include several options to retrieve APEX users information. You can use the ‘fetch_user’ procedure to retrieve all the available information for a specific user; you can use ‘get_user_id’ to retrieve the user ID of any user (providing you have ADMIN privileges) and tou can use ‘get_current_user_id’ to retrieve the current user ID (and compare it with your table, etc.). You can find the documentation in here - http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10513_01/doc/apirefs.310/e12855/apex_util.htm#CHDIEDJH .
>> would the team still recommend other authentication schemes?
I can’t speak for the team (I’m not part of it) but I don’t see a connection between exposing more APEX API to the users, and any authentication schemes policy they might, or might not have. In any case, authentication policy is something that should be determined according to the specific needs of your organization. In some cases the APEX authentication can be good enough, and for others hardly enough. I believe it would be irresponsible to recommend any kind of security policy without knowing specific details of the working environment.
Regards,
Arie.