Currently to launch to the UI and for all API requests a USER_ID header must be present which contains a know user. This may have made sense when authentication/authorization was done by ONAP Portal.  However, ONAP Portal has gone to unmaintained state and is no longer included by default in ONAP deployments.

Forcing the presence of the USER_ID header has no security value as the user is not authenticated (authentication is done by service mesh in ONAP). Therefore it is nothing more than an inconvenience to uses. 

Nonetheless, SDC needs to know the user so we cannot simply remove it. Therefore I propose that we make it optional in all places, with a default user where no value is supplied. The default value being "cs0008".

A more complete solution would be to integrate with authentication mechanism to determine the user, however we dont have resources to implement that at this time, so this so is just a practical step to ease usage of SDC. 

As part of this solution SDC documentation should be updated