Administration

This document describes a number of xReporter-administration related things.

Creating users

Creating a user is a matter of adding a record in a database table. The exact table and column names are configurable in the config.xml. By default it contains the following:

<user-table table-name="users" user-column="username"/>

xReporter doesn't know about user passwords, the authentication is left to the presentation layer. xReporter uses this table only to check if a given user exists. Usually the table mentioned here will be the same as the one used by the presentation layer, and will thus also contain a password column.

To enable users to do something useful, one or more roles should be assigned to them. These roles will provide access rights to certain reports. The table and column names for the roles table are also configurable in the config.xml:

<roles-table table-name="roles" user-column="username" roles-column="role"/>

In a similar manner it is also possible to assign a data source authorisation code to a user. Without such a code, a user will not be able to access data sources. Which data source authorisation codes give access to which data sources, is configured in an XML file. This is described here.

Additionally, it is possible to optionally assign a customer and a set of user-defined properties to each user. The exact table and column names are again specified in the config.xml. The custom properties can be retrieved in expressions using the UserProperty function.

Assigning access rights on reports

In order to make a report usable by a user, the roles of the user should provide the necessary access rights. This is configured in a database table, w hose name is again found in the config.xml:

<accesscontrol-table table-name="accesscontrol" report-id-column="report_id"
          user-role-column="user_role"/>

If the user has the role "foo" and needs access to the report with ID "bar", then you would insert a record "foo, bar" in this table. By doing this all users that have the role "foo" will get access to the report "bar".

Note that when a user has access to a data source and to a report, it is still possible that the report does not appear in the report catalog. There is one additional criterion for this: the report should be compatible with the data source type. The type of the data source is configured in the file with data sources, and the type of data source required by report is mentioned in the report definition file. More information on this can be found elsewhere in the documentation.