Portal, JAZN, Perspectives and Categories - oh my

Question

Using only java, how do I connect to the OID server, and find out if a specific user is part of a particular perspecive or category defined in portal?
Simple example: I want to know if user named "bob" is a member of the "HR" perspective. Eventually, it would be great to have this as a taglib.
I want to create a web app (Running in a different OC4J than portal) using jDeveloper that authorizes pages based on the security a person has in portal. How can this be done.
Is there a documented relationship between OID data and Portal User data. Can the two be used together?
Can someone post example code, or post a link to documentation that describes this?

Answer 1

On the first question, users are not classified in to
perspectives or categories ... only the Portal
content is classified that way. So, unless I'm
misunderstanding your question, there's no way to
determine if Bib is a member of the HR Perspective,
because there's no way to associate him with that
perspective in the first place.
Just thinking out loud, but it doesn't make sense that a data driven ORACLE product wouldn't store this information in a relational structure that could be accessed. Just my .02 on that one. Thanks for the feedback!
On the second question, this one is fairly
straightforward. When building your web app, you
should define J2EE security-roles that you want to
map to the OID-based Portal groups.
Place J2EE security-constraints on the pages you want
to secure, referencing the security-roles you
defined.
Then, when deploying the app, map the J2EE security
roles to the OID-based groups. You can do this in
the deployment plan, and you should see the mapping
reflected in the orion-web.xml file. You should set
the security provider for your app to Oracle Identity
Management. See how to do this in the OC4J Security
Guide.Working on this now. Thank you for the guidance!