What's the best way... -Reply

[Kogan, Arthur]

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	>	We do something similar with a separate set of security
tables to check users against allowable functions rather than using 
	>	the inbuilt PH security options.

	I have always preferred this type of security, i.e. table based
application security (and it looks like most people have adopted something
similar). It is a lot more flexible than file/element based security and
allows you to modify security on the fly (as opposed to PH application
security) without recompilation required. This approach also allows IT
department to offload security
	maintenance to the user department (restricted to the system owner
and with appropriate audit trail).
	This type of security relies on preventing users from having direct
access to the operating system (i.e. users are contained within the PH
application), with further restrictions required to things like FTP (e.g.
users can only FTP to and from their own directory).

	>	Additionally we have a number of screens which we use for
both update and enquiry, based on the access the user has. To 
	>	avoid the user entering any information without reason we
have an input procedure for each field for which data can be 
	>	entered which calls a common internal procedure to check the
security and issue an error if appropriate. It is a bit of 
	>	additional coding, but a neater user interface than waiting
until the preupdate, or even the edit procedure for that matter. 

	Yes, this is much neater, but I suspect it requires more than just a
bit of additional coding!!! You also have to make sure the security code is
in every procedure for every screen. 

	I would strongly suggest that you develop a script that would parse
your screen sourse for field names and create an input procedure calling the
use file for each one (where no such procedure exists) or add the call to
the use file (if the procedure exists, but does not contain the use file
call). The script should also check/ammend/create other procedures like
PREENTRY, PREUPDATE, DELETE etc... The script would need a bit more smarts
built in to change access to fields in the FIND procedure for entering into
prompted fields (otherwise the user would not be able to FIND things). This
would save you a lot of coding and checking. 

	We did this for adding such code in the INITIALIZE procedure in
every screen (we did not go as far as you in terms of security granularity)
and added this script into our compilation macro, so developers did not have
to remember to do this, it was automatically (and consistantly) done for all
screens during compilation. This was on UNIX and used "nawk", do not know
how easy this can be done in DCL, you could write a C program to do this in
any case.

	You are either extremely nice to your users or they are extremely
fussy (probably the later, being a government organisation). Anyhow, all
these things are essentially workarounds for the problem of not having a
nice 4GL way of accomplishing this functionality.

	Arthur Kogan
	Westpac Financial Services
	Sydney, Australia

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