Hi Tim, thanks for your reply and all of the information. I will definitely head to the bookstore today and see if I can find this book. I can't understand the need for objects if you can't have them available through an entire session. The book you suggest sounds like it might help.

And yup, I had thought of the global temporary table and I might go that way. Currently I have a VFP custom object that contains the user information. What I have been doing is passing these as needed to the stored procedures and packages on Oracle. I was hoping to duplicate something like this in Oracle while at the same time teaching myself something new < g >.

I do have a LOGON trigger right now that I can modify so perhaps I'll do that. Thanks for your help and the code example!

George

>Hi George,
>
>Tom Kytes book, Expert One on One Oracle. Has an excellent chapter on
>Object Oreiented Features. His examples cover :
>
>-Custom Data Types with Methods and Properties
>-select * from pl_sql_function
>-Present Object Releational view of relational data
>-Create tables of different Types
>
>
>What I would try in your case is using a GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE
>and a LOGON Trigger..But you need 8i or newer.
>
>I.E. Create a Logon Trigger that populates a GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE
>That you can query and use throughout the users session.
>When the user quits or exits the application the Table is cleared
>automatically.
>
>Here's a possible example...
>

>CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE UserInfo(
>   ID Varchar2(20),
>   AccessLevel number(1),
>   Status number(1),
>   LoginTime date
>);
>
>
>--The default is the user only sees his sessions data you can also
>make it so you can see all users data (see help)
>
>--You could also make a custom type
>create or replace trigger init_userobject
>   after logon on database
>begin
>   insert into userinfo (ID,AccessLevel,Status,LoginTime)
>   values (user,1,0,sysdate);
>end;
>/
>
>Then throught the application you can query the useinfo table.
>
>

>
>This at least solves the problem of getting the object to exist during the
>session. I'm sure you can wrap it in a more object oriented way
>i.e. using a custom type and methods or even JAVA code...
>But this is the way I would start with it..
>
>Another common package to use is use the DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO
>package which will register application info in the v$session table.
>Have a look in the help and see if it will work for you.
>
>I use it to register users that use my app when I query v$session
>so that I can tell users in my app from other database users.
>
>
>
>Hope That helps.