Manage Your Own Data Source Credentials

It is important to manage data source credentials for your users because these credentials are required for certain tasks.

You may be prompted for your data source credentials when you perform the following actions:

view, run, or open an entry (seeReports and Cubes)
use a schedule or a job (seeSchedule Management)
select the data sources that can be used to create a package Select Which Data Sources Can Be Used to Create a Package

You may also be prompted for data source credentials when you use Framework Manager (see the Framework Manager User Guide).

If you are an administrator, you can also create or modify data source signons Create or Modify a Data Source Signon, but if you have a lot of users, it can be unwieldy for data source configurations that require each user to have their own signon since the credentials for each user must be done individually. You can also view the data source credentials for other users.

Note that credentials are checked in the following order:

first, the signons that you create as an administrator are checked
if no credentials are found for the user, the user's profile is checked to see if they have stored their own credentials
if no credentials for the user are found in either place, the user is prompted for credentials

This is important because if you create credentials after a user has saved their own credentials, they get data associated with the credentials that you created for them, which might not be what they are expecting.

Before you begin

If you are a user, your administrator must give you execute permissions for the Manage own data source signons capability and traverse permissions for its ancestors. You must also have read and traverse permissions on your account. You can then save credentials to your personal profile, as long as you do not have access to any predefined signons for the data source. You are not prompted for your credentials if you have permission to access an existing data source credential and you have saved the personal credential in your profile. You can view and delete your data source credentials from the My Preferences page.

To view another user's credentials, you must have read and traverse permissions on the user's account. To remove data source credentials, you must have read, write, and transverse permissions on the user's account.