Java Development Tools

Hi,

I'm part of the development team of a system with about 100 screens. The customer would like us to add some read-only functionality to the system, so that certain users are able to access the screens but not change any of the data on them. We already have policies in place on the database level that keeps read-only users from saving data, but it's not very user friendly to allow users to change data on a screen, only to tell them that they're not allowed to save those changes once they try to do so. It would clearly be better if all components are rendered as read-only components for read-only users, making them unable to make any data changes in the first place.

User privileges in the system are controlled by roles defined and set in the system (not ADF roles or Weblogic roles). At any given time and place, it's possible to check whether the current user has a certain role. We already use this in a number of places to make it possible to control which user has access to which screens. In a few places we even control which functionality should be enabled for the current user within a screen, but mostly the access control is currently on the screen level. With read-only users getting access to all screens, it seems we will need lot of extra in-screen access control to keep these users from changing anything.

But what's the best practice here? One way to go would be to add some logic to every single active component on every single screen, to determine whether it should be rendered as active or disabled/read-only. But that would require a lot of extra coding.

So my question is: Is there a smarter way to do this? Maybe something done through skinning? Or something else?

(I'm not sure how relevant this is for this sort of question, but we're currently using JDev 11.1.1.4.0, and expect to upgrade to 11.1.1.6.0 within the next 6 months)

Best regards,
Andreas