How Are an Object's Permission Assigned?

The permissions for a folder, Oracle BI Publisher object, or other objects are assigned by either the object owner, the content designer, or the catalog's administrator. Before someone other than the content designer can assign permissions to an object, that person must have been given ownership of the object, granted the Change Permissions privilege by the Presentation Services administrator, and have been given the Change Permissions object permission, which is listed in the "Custom Permissions dialog." For more information about setting the Change Permissions privileges, see "Managing Presentation Services Privileges" in Security Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

When the content designer creates an object and saves it to a folder, the object inherits the permissions that are set on the folder. After the object is saved, the content designer can display either the catalog's "Tasks pane" or the object's More... link, locate the object, access the "Permissions dialog," and modify the object's permissions. If the object's Read-Only property, which is set on the "Properties dialog," is selected, then no one other than the owner can modify the object's permissions. This read-only setting essentially trumps any permissions that are set in the Permission dialog.

When working with an object, you use the Permissions dialog to assign who gets which object permissions in the following ways:

To Application roles — This is the recommended way of assigning permissions. Application roles provide much easier maintenance of users and their assignments. An Application role defines a set of permissions granted to a user or group that has that role in the system's identity store. An Application role is assigned in accordance with specific conditions. As such, Application roles are granted dynamically based on the conditions present at the time authentication occurs.

For information on Application roles, see Security Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
To individual users — You can assign permissions and privileges to specific users, but such assignments can be more difficult to maintain and so this approach is not recommended.
To Catalog groups — This approach is maintained for backward compatibility with previous releases (prior to 11g) only. For information about Catalog groups, see "Working with Catalog Groups" in Security Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.