Mass Creation of Data Source Logons

[msamis]

Is there a way to mass create Data Source signons?  We need to create hundreds of individual logins (not groups) to a data source.  To go though the normal procedure in Cognos Administration of creating the login, adding the username and password, then connecting it to the data source takes about one minute.  I thought there might be a way to save time and mass load users via some SDK or scripting procedure.

[tjohnson3050]

Are you going to assign each sign on to a single person?  That sounds like a maintenance nightmare.  Have you fully investigated passing the credentials of the logged on user down to the datasource instead?

[msamis]

Thanks for replying.
Yes. We are using Oracle Enterprise and VPD (Virtual Private Database) and the credentials are actually passed to the data source.  The problem is each user must view their own data specific to them (hense the VPD). So far the only way we have found to do this is to create the Cognos signon individually.

[tjohnson3050]

I think your best bet would be to integrate Oracle Authentication with whatever directory you are using for Cognos (AD, Sun etc).

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/identity-management/059380.pdf

That way, the signed on user credentials can pass all the way down to Oracle, and you only have to setup one sign on for your database connection.

If you can't do that, I don't how to script the creation of the logins, perhaps someone else here might be able to help with that aspect.

[bdbits]

Beyond what tjohnson3050 wrote, you would likely have to write an app with the SDK, which is not free. As far as I know there is no 'scripting' support.

[cognostechie]

How is the data seperated in Oracle for different users? Only by their user-id or some other field like Entity for a whole group or department? I would presume the data won't be different for each user but rather by some group unless it is like Salesreps should see only their sales or something like that.

Either way, you can use a standard sign-on for everybody and then use the parameterised security in Framework or even reports using Cognos macros so that each user gets to see only his/her data.