FreeAnalysis Schema Designer for UnitedOlap (part 4)

Dear Readers,

Security is a tricky subject, especially when some leasy editors only bundle different products without merging repositories and authentification services. Did you ever tried to secure a Mondrian schema manually and deploy it under JPivot (oups : dont forget to let the hierarchy without name …) … ok, it’s possible .. but it doesn’t compare with what is available in commercial products.

Inside Vanilla platform, we had to enhance FreeAnalysis Schema Designer to provide access to authentification database and create secured views, leading to declare security signon in both : FreeMetadata and FreeAnalysis. It’s running well, but we wanted to enhance the process.

UnitedOlap is able to use Oda dataset, so we can use the FreeMetadata oda secured data source and keep all the security declaration in FreeMetadata (subject to merge FreeMetadata and FreeAnalysis Schema Designer is out of scope of this post). Just look how it works :

1) Supposed in FreeMetadata you secure your fact table on order status, for a specific group of users (Status “Resolved”)

2) Using FreeAnalysis Schema Designer, just declare a FreeMetadata Oda datasource, and select your datasets

3) Design your cube with a dimension that has a secured item (very simple design for this example) :

4) Result in FreeAnalysis Web, with 2 different groups

System (no security)

Designer (Security set with Status = Resolved)

You can see above : No filter in the “Filter” box … security is automatically set from the datasource, using user’s connexion. And for this user, a bonus : the Tomcat Log, where you can see the filter in the where clause … very clean and efficient

Have Fun !

Patrick