1. North Orange County Community College District
Extending Luminis/Self Service Banner Oracle Application Express (APEX)
Adam Howard
Systems Analyst
North Orange County Community College District

2. Application Express (APEX)
Web-based
Rapid application development environment
Installed to your Oracle database
Free to use

3. More APEX features
Minimal coding required to create functional apps/reports; wizards
Access to any table in database (with perms)
Can customize processing with PL/SQL
Powerful Interactive Reports for sorting/filtering results
Can run on your SSB web server (DAD)

4. Authentication via Luminis/SSB
Technique presented at SETA 2008 by Debra Miller and Nicole Johns of Athens State:
Custom APEX authentication scheme
Code for auto-login
Procedure in SSB redirects to APEX app
Luminis SSO to SSB via sctssb connector
Giving credit where credit is due

5. Authentication details
SSB session values passed to APEX from SSB procedure and stored in “application items”
Authentication scheme calls function to verify SSB session values
Login page process can populate username and other data to persist for the session

6. Authentication steps User logs into Luminis
User clicks link for APEX app
Luminis performs SSO to SSB
SSB page briefly processes
User arrives at application “landing” page

7. Authorization options
Control what parts of app which users can use
Use any means available via SQL, PL/SQL:
“Role” tables in Banner: WebTailor, GOVROLE, GURIROL, GURUCLS
User attributes from Banner (e.g. student in current term)
Table local to your app
Others: Luminis directory via DBMS_LDAP, etc, etc

8. Authorization details
Set up one or more “Authorization Schemes” in the application
Schemes can be applied at app, page, page region, or page item level

9. Demo screenshots follow

10. Log into Luminis

11. Click the District-Wide Staff Development Registration Calendar link on the right

12. After a second or two, you’re signed into the calendar app.
This app has two authorization levels;
if you’re just an employee, you can register for a session, and change or view your registrations.
If you’re an app administrator, you can create and edit training sessions, manage registrations for a session, and more.
App administrators are defined locally in this app. We repurposed a demo app from Oracle since it was a very close fit for our needs, with only some tweaks required.

13. When you click on an event, it pre-populates your name and from Banner tables. We left it editable to allow you to register someone else for a session.
We found this application as a demo app for APEX. It met almost all our needs, and only needed tweaking to make it work well for us.

14. This app never made it to production (notice the “Summer 2009”), but it’s a good example of APEX Interactive reports.

15. Multiple options for column headings: sort, hide, break into sections, and filter

16. If you click the gear, more options, including ability to sort on multiple columns

17. If you’re a developer, you can save your filter/sort settings as a default for all users.

18. Now we’re at the Application Builder screen, about to take a look at how to set up authentication via SSB.

19. For your new authentication scheme, the main thing to add is the authentication function.

20. Add application items for SESSIONID and WEBID
Add application items for SESSIONID and WEBID. SSB passes these to APEX, which stores them from the URL into these application variables.

21. On the login page for your app, this is the code for retrieving some info from Banner database and loading to a page variable.

22. Authorization schemes
Authorization schemes. You can set up as many as you need, so you can have different authorization levels for any part of your application.

23. Here’s an example of an authorization scheme SQL query

24. On the edit screen for a page in the application
On the edit screen for a page in the application. You can set authorization scheme for the whole page (this page has No authorization scheme currently). Regions, buttons, items can all have their own authorization schemes set too.

25. Choose any of your authorization schemes for the page, or the inverse of your authorization scheme.

26. Questions? If you have any questions contact:
Adam Howard:
Or post your question to the Banner Application Express Yahoo Group
This has been a brief overview of Oracle Application Express and how you can tie it into Banner and Banner Self Service.

27. Goodies Inside the embedded zip file to the right, you’ll find:
f135.sql – Import this file to your APEX workspace for a simple app that demonstrates SSO from SSB
bzgkapex.sql – Database package body containing code for APEX SSO and self-service Banner procedure
Single Sign-On to APEX Applications.html – Instructions on setting up SSO to APEX from our dept wiki
The blue box is an embedded zip file. Not sure why it didn’t display the icon?

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The End!
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