Re: Windows domain authentication and Oracle

Martin Harris wrote:

> 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.

Go to http://tahiti.oracle.com and look up the SYS_CONTEXT function.

You can not use it inside of a Forms 6 form AFAIK but you can wrap it inside of a database function and return any of its values.

--
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/extinfo/certprog/oad/oad_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)