Passing parameters to Forms/reports

Question

Once the portal user logs in (using the single sign on), they will need the ability to pull up employee information.
I have a table that stores their employee_num and pin_num. In order to see their info, they must correctly enter
these 2 columns. A manager would also be able to see an employees info. That being the case, I need to prompt
for employee_num and pin_num. I will need to use these values in my 'where clauses' of forms and reports
(so I only display the appropriate info). Since there will be many forms/reports that a employee can run, I only
want to prompt for this info 1 time and pass it to the appropriate forms, reports, HTML portlets etc.
I know you can have bind variables in reports (and have the user enter), but there will be many reports and they
would have to enter this info each time. Is there a way to have this info automatically passed to the report?

Answer 1

As Chetan has correctly suggested, it will be better to use a table to store
the emp no and their pin against their login session ids.
You can have a table as :-
create table emp_pin (
session_id integer,
emp_no integer,
emp_pin integer,
constraint emp_pin_fk1 foreign key (session_id) references <portal_schema>.wwctx_sso_session$(id) on delete cascade
When a user logs into portal, a session_id is created and this session_id is
deleted when the user logs out. The delete cascade rule will clean up your
table entry when the user logs out.
You can get this session_id using the <portal_schema>.wwctx_api.get_sessionid function.
Now you need to create 2 functions that would return the emp_no and emp_pin.
You can then use these functions in the sql query of your reports. This way you
need not use bind variables at all.
Example:-
create or replace function get_empno(p_sess_id in integer)
return varchar2
is
l_empno varchar2(2000);
begin
select emp_no
into l_empno
where session_id = p_sess_id;
return l_empno;
end;
create or replace function get_emp_pin(p_sess_id in integer)
return varchar2
is
l_emp_pin varchar2(2000);
begin
select emp_pin
into l_emp_pin
where session_id = p_sess_id;
return l_emp_pin;
end;
Now, these functions can be used in SQL query of your reports as :-
select <col1>, <col2>, <col3>
from <table>
where empno = get_empno(<portal_schema>.wwctx_api.get_sessionid)
and emp_pin = get_emp_pin(<portal_schema>.wwctx_api.get_sessionid)
and ....
In a form, you can use these functions to set the default values of the empno,
emp_pin fields.