Before you consider how to authenticate users, ensure that you understand the difference between authentication and authorization. As an application developer, you are responsible for handling how users are authenticated. BI Beans handles the authorization of users.
A BI Beans application can authenticate the user in any of the following situations:
Upon startup. If you choose to authenticate the user before allowing access to the application itself, then you use facilities that are external to BI Beans, such as Oracle Application Server Single Sign-On.
Upon connection to a data store. If you choose to authenticate
the user before allowing access to the BI Beans Catalog or to Oracle OLAP,
then you can create authentication
drivers by implementing the AuthenticationProvider
interface
and registering
and turning on each driver.
By default, in a BI Beans application, authentication drivers are turned off and connection drivers are turned on, because connection drivers are required. If you decide to implement an authentication driver for a given connection, then the authentication driver is invoked before the connection driver, at the time that a user attempts to connect to the BI Beans Catalog or to the OLAP data source. Properties that are set inside the authentication driver are available to the connection driver through the Connection object.