On OBIEE 11g:

• Oracle recommends that Oracle BI Presentation Catalog groups be used for backward compatibility only and that Application Roles be used instead for new installations.

Catalog Groups as a way of doing things went away a long time ago ... do you have a mix of them and application roles (due to moving from 10g in the past)?

You don't want end users managing your application roles ... you want a BI Administrator or at least one of your Oracle Fusion Middleware Admins doing it.

You got already some alternatives above on how to manage that need.

Staying on the "default" way to manage things you would have to collect and analyse detailed web logs of the Adminserver: the EM interface you use execute actions when you add/remove somebody from a role, so you would probably extract these actions from the webserver log etc.

But it's for sure not as easy and practical than using a DB table to map users into roles (and APEX on top).

Not to make too fine a point but next time maybe check which answer arrived in which chronological order :-P

So it goes...

I said to Dude! on the ideas forum that sometimes the awarding of points is capricious and random Dude! this is the kind of thing I had in mind...