Role Design

[Former Member]

Hi All,

I am integrating SAP Portal with a .Net application. The .Net application has .aspx pages which serve as menu items which provides various functionality. Users can be assigned / removed menu items. When I bring this into the SAP Portal I am creating individual iviews for each page and building the same menu structure in SAP Portal. The problem is with the role assignment. If I build one role and have the same menu structure as the .Net application then assigning this role will show all menu items in the portal. If user has been disabled with certain menus in .Net application then I need to hide those menu items in SAP Portal as well for that particular user.

Having one role per iview and going for merging at run time seems a possibility but appears to be heavy during run time and also number of roles will be quite high and increase as menu items increases. I read about PCD filter but not sure if I can utilize that. Any thoughts?

Cheers!!

[Former Member]

Hi Kiran,

This is an interesting problem ... so if I understand you right your .NET application has it's own role concept that controls what content a user can see and this is managed in the .NET application. Now you want to integrate that application into the SAP Portal and you are creating an iView for each .NET page and assembling those iViews into Portal role(s), but you want the portal roles to mirror the .NET roles/permissions... (it would be nice if there was the equivalent of Remote Role Assignment for you to use)

Are you not better of letting the .NET application continue to manage the navigation structure and just have a single portal iView that displays the menu and pages from the .NET application? If you intend to re-create all the role combinations in the portal and .NET app then you will create quite an administration overhead - as you will need to manually keep both in Sync...

Not 100% sure what you mean by "create one role per iView" - does it need to be that granular? You are right to worry about performance in this scenario as you could be doing a lot of merges, but then you also have the Navigation cache which would help I think.

Sorry I don't see a magic bullet here... but I would be interested to find out how best you solve this.

Thanks,
Simon

[Former Member]

Hi Simon,

The reason I cannot have just one view and let the .Net application manage navigation is because the .Net application also has a navigation structure similar to portal with 2 levels of TLN and 1 DTN. Bringing this into SAP Portal will result in 4 levels of navigation and is not presentable.

I am planning to go ahead with the role merging atleast for POC but will update this post with the final solution.

Thanks,
Kiran