Application Development

An application must be able to identify its users and to prevent users without proper identification from its use.

Two-tier Applications

In two-tier applications, user authentication is needed for database access. When you connect to most database engines, you must supply a user name and password.

Panther applications use DBMS DECLARE CONNECTION statements to connect to a database engine. The documentation for each database engine lists the connection options available for that engine; refer to Database Drivers .

JetNet Applications

JetNet applications have two levels of identification:

• Connections to the middleware by the application users in the client_init command.

• Connections to the database by the application server using DBMS DECLARE CONNECTION.

MTS Applications

MTS offers two types of security for component packages: programmatic security, which uses interfaces to call within the application, and declarative security, which assigns users, or groups of users, to roles.

A role is the name assigned to a group of users that will access a component package. For example, a human resources application could define roles for Manager and Employee.

Panther MTS applications can implement programmatic security using the following functions which call methods of the IObjectContext interface:

• sm_mts_IsCallerInRole—Determines if a caller is assigned to a role, where caller is the identity of the process calling into the server.

• sm_mts_IsSecurityEnabled—Determines if security checking is enabled.

Refer to Microsoft's MTS Documentation for additional information about MTS package security.