Windows domain authentication and Oracle

While I would normally scour the newsgroups for answers, only having posted twice in my life, I have a problem that I am not finding an easy answer to. I have a NT4server that has Oracle 8.1.7 standard downloaded from Oracles OTN cite. The NT4 server is a member of the Universities Windows 2000 domain structure and can thus authenticate users based upon domain user accounts provided by the University through their PDC's.

The short question.

   I want to write an application in Forms 6.0 that enables and disables certain features of the application based upon the domain account that is logged in on the client running the forms. Some kind of conditional testing in the pre-form trigger that will set properties on the various tab pages, canvases and buttons and such. I can write the code for the preform trigger if I can get the login account name from the environmental system variables of the client, but I am not sure how to do that in Oracle. Is there an easy way? An alternative that is just as simple, but more intuitive and useful?

The long explanation to answer the why not do it this way questions.

   I realize there are better ways of doing this, like setting up roles in Oracle that would disallow access to various parts of the Oracle system based on privileges, but I don't know a lot about the dba stuff for Oracle. The class is mostly to teach application development concepts. I am just looking for a kind of cute way to simulate an application that would behave differently given different logins, but using the OS of the client to handle that behavior and assuming that all Forms users would be using the same Oracle login account name and password. An account that has DBA priivileges.

   Yes, probably not a real likely real world scenario, and I have thought about other ways of doing it, like having a table that contains login names and different passwords that handle the different roles and then building the first canvas as a login canvas. I have also thought of setting read write permissions on the actual forms that get called from the intial switchbox (main) form so that depending on login account information you may or may not be able to run the forms I want to limit, but that seems like it would trigger errors that then need to be trapped and handled, and also allows the feature to look like it is available when it is not, which probably is not real good software engineering design. Besides, the trick I describes seems intriguing to me, I use it in VB a lot, and I kind of would like to know how to do it if I should ever encounter a situation it was more appropriate to use it in. Something learning about programming should be about :).

Thanks in advance,
Martin Harris
Southwest Missouri State University. Received on Sat May 03 2003 - 00:29:47 CDT