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This document illustrates techniques for controlling access to data used in action sequences in the Pentaho BI Platform. It assumes familiarity with the Pentaho BI Platform, creating action sequences using the action sequence editor, and SQL database queries. We recommend reading the Creating Pentaho Solutions guide and Getting Started with Design Studio prior to reading this document.
Motivation
When developing an action sequence, you may need to restrict a user's view of the available data based on some criteria. For instance, you may develop an action sequence that queries a database for financial information, and displays the financial information in a web page. However you may want to restrict a user's view of the financial data to the data from the user's region (e.g. Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern). You can use a system action to assist in filtering the data provided to the user.
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A system action is simply an action sequence that is configured to run either at system start time (i.e. when the application server starts) or session start time (i.e. when the user logs in). The output of a system action is available to other action sequences as input parameters. System actions are configured by adding the appropriate child elements to the <system-action> element in the pentaho.xml file.
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In this example we'll develop an action sequence to generate an HTML report containing financial data for the current user's region. This suggests that when the user logs in, we need to identify the user's region, and store this information someplace that we can use later in our action sequence.
To identify the user's region, let's create a new action sequence in Eclipse using the action sequence editor.
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