Notice the attributes listed below the user’s roles in “Rita’s User Account”. CZS implemented them in order to take advantage of the variable substitution feature, which simplifies the creation of the access grant definition. This section explains the concept.

CZS determined that they need to describe their users in terms of the product lines that they sell and the geographical areas where they sell. Thus, each CZS user is assigned five attributes:

Each user’s attributes determine the data returned to him by the view, based on an access grant definition that refers to these attributes by using variable substitution. For example, Rita’s attribute value for Cities is San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento while Pete’s is San Francisco. Thus, Pete sees a subset of the data Rita sees.

CZS assigned the following attributes to their users:

At a high level, CZS took the following steps in defining and leveraging attributes:

For details about configuring attributes and Mondrian connections, refer to:

Defining Attributes for Users

Attributes can be created for each user, role, or organization defined in the server. At the user level, they are maintained as part of the account, which you can edit by clicking Manage > Users. CZS edited each of their users to include the attributes they mapped out during their planning phase. Editing Rita’s User Attributes shows Rita’s attributes in the Manage > Users page.

For more information, refer to the TIBCO JasperReports Server Administrator Guide.

Using Attributes in an Access Grant Definition

With the attributes defined, CZS took advantage of them using variable substitution in their access grant definitions, as described in Attributes and Variable Substitution.

CZS's access grant definition (czs-access-grant.agxml) is shown in Access Grant Definition for CZS. It utilizes the attributes discussed in this section (Country, Region, State, Cities, and ProductDepartment ).