Creating a user menu for several Forms 10 applications
Hi
I am investigating best practices for designing a menu which will allow users to access a suite of Forms 10 applications.
Our current setup is Forms 3 and we are migrating it to Forms 10. The current system generates a menu using a standard block with a fixed number of display rows, and the rows are populated from descriptions held in the database. The user moves the cursor (with the keyboard) to the row and presses enter and the appropriate application, or sub menu is called.
E.g.
-----------------------------------
| Research System |
| Finance System |
| Student System |
| Programmer's Admin |
-----------------------------------
This menu system is bespoke and was written in the late 1980s I believe. All of the descriptions, associated menus and sub-menus, and program module names are stored in a structured set of tables, together with user access rights. Each Oracle user account name is held in a table against the menu or module name. This means it is possible to extract and generate a series of custom menus for any given user. This access rights information is still relevant once we move to Forms 10 and we wish to continue using it if feasible.
I would be interested to hear from other users in the Forms community as to how they manage user access to Forms 10 applications. Our present thoughts are that we should recreate the Forms 3 system in Forms 10, but we are also aware that Oracle "roles" may well be very useful in this situation. We already use roles for managing user access to database tables, but not for Forms module access. We are aware of Resource Access Descriptors but would like some pointers as to how best to implement them.
The menu system that we need to create is dynamic and is not the .mmb/.mmx type of menu that is added to Form modules. This is a "top level" menu controlling access to applications, not to screens or blocks within applications.
On a related note, our converted Forms 10 systems (we have migrated 3 already) each have a .env file on the Forms 10 server. Are we correct to assume that we need to bundle related Forms modules into systems and manage them in this way?
Thanks in advance for any advice you can give. :)