Security in Cubes

[dssd]

I have a requirement where i have a tree prompt with  Company->Division->Department->Area.......I want a person to only see his own Area & departments etc when he runs a report...Similarly also when he drills up & down in the report. Is it possible? I heard of Custom Views could be used. Are there any limitations for it?

[norkos]

Hi,

Yes, you are right. You have to use custom views to fulfil this.

In theory there are no limitation.
In practice you can face with a problem if you use Cognos 8.4. In this version the union of custom views doesn't work properly. You can't set custom views on more than one dimension and even the users can belong only for one custom view. This bug was fixed in version 8.4.1

[dssd]

Do we loose custom views if we do a clean house or rebuild cubes?

[dssd]

I have heard there are maintenance issues with Custom views. Could anyone tell me what are those issues

[norkos]

If the clean house doesn't delete the items for which you have set permissions, than a clean house won't destroy your custom views. It's the same case with cube build.

You can get maintenance issues with custom views quite easily but this is not mandatory.
If you use only roles and groups from your namespace in the custom views, and create the cube permissions with unions and intersections of views and custom views than you can get a permission system which will be permanent also in long term.
If you use complex custom views containing also users than likely the cognos administrator will have to do a lot of maintenance task...

So try to design your cube permissions with the combination of simple custom views

[dssd]

Do we need any VB scripts for Custom Views?