Controlling Report Users and Roles

InetSoft's reporting software provides powerful administrative tools that allow command over users and roles, serving to either distribute or limit access for predetermined members. View the information below to learn more about the Style Intelligence solution.

Users, roles, and groups can be managed using the functions available under the Users tab. The navigation tree on the page under this tab includes two nodes: 'Users' and 'Roles'. The 'Users' node lists all of the users and groups in the system and the 'Roles' node lists all of the roles.

Note: Users, groups, and roles can be created and configured in the Enterprise Manager only when using the 'Default Security Provider'. While using the 'LDAP Security Provider', users/groups/roles will be imported from the LDAP schema and when using the 'User Defined Security Provider', they will be retrieved from the custom implementation.

For efficiency, the number of users listed in the navigation tree under LDAP security is limited by the em.user.max property (default 1000). Unlisted users can be found by searching.

Let us now look at Roles, Groups, and their design philosophy in more detail. A 'Group' usually refers to a collection of people (e.g., a project team, the sales department, etc). Users belonging to the same group may have different functions or 'Roles' (e.g., Manager, Developer, Analyst, Tester, etc).

Groups are organizational in nature, while roles are more functional in nature. Although this is the design philosophy and the intent of having both roles and groups, the way they are actually used depends on the discretion of the administrator and could vary in different organizations.

The following are some rules which govern users, roles and groups:

Note: Names of users, groups, and roles may not contain certain characters (e.g., “&,” “/”).

• Groups and Roles are independent, i.e., you do not have to define both groups and roles in your system. You can have just one or the other, or both, defined.
• A user can belong to more than one group.
• A user can have multiple roles
• An entire group can be assigned one or more roles.
• A role can be applied to one or more groups.
• A role can inherit all of the permissions from another role.
• Permissions to reports and other components can be assigned directly to users, groups, and roles.

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