Special characters in user IDs and passwords

Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows

Special characters in user IDs and passwords

This topic describes the special characters that are allowed in user IDs or passwords and rules for using them.

Under normal circumstances a valid user ID may contain only the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, period (.), dash (-), underscore ( _ ), exclamation (!), tilde (~), and number sign (#). Diacritics, such as the umlauts, are not supported. Valid passwords may contain only the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, period (.), dash (-), underscore ( _ ), exclamation (!), tilde (~), and number sign (#). Diacritics, such as the umlauts, and DBCS are not supported.

When a person signs up as a user or when an administrator enrolls a user, they complete the user information form. On this form, do not enter characters that might not be supported. Regardless of what characters you are able to enter on the user information form, user IDs and passwords are limited to the valid characters described in this section. You can specify other characters in the First Name and Last Name fields. The table below contains a list of the required fields on the user information form and the supported characters.

User information form fields Valid characters Characters not supported
User ID Diacritics, such as the umlaut
Password / Confirm password Diacritics, such as the umlaut, and DBCS characters

Login will fail if the password contains any special characters, including DBCS characters. This will happen even if a user is successfully enrolled using a password containing DBCS characters.
When using the install wizard, if the password contains any special characters you will receive an error message that states which character is invalid. For example, "Invalid text [%] entered".
Notes:

If you receive the message: "Invalid text [] entered)", the invalid character is the right parenthesis ( ) ).
If you receive the message: "Invalid text [] entered", the invalid character is the comma ( , ).

First Name All characters n/a
Last Name All characters n/a

The above characters are true if user.UNIQUEID.charset is set to ascii. If set to unicode, the standard Java Letter definition is used and all characters that are recognized as letter or digit by Java are allowed by default. Modify the following properties in Puma Validation service as described in Setting configuration properties:

Add supported userid character values to the user.UNIQUEID.extra_chars key.
Add supported password character values to the password.extra_chars key.
Add supported, special character values to the group.extra key.
Add special short group ID attributes to the group.RDN key.
Change the maximum character length of the group name on the group.RDN.max key.
Change the minimum character length of the group name on the group.RDN.min key.
Change the charset (either ascii or unicode) on the user.UNIQUEID.charset key.

Parent topic:
Planning considerations

User information form fields	Valid characters	Characters not supported
User ID		Diacritics, such as the umlaut
Password / Confirm password		Diacritics, such as the umlaut, and DBCS characters Login will fail if the password contains any special characters, including DBCS characters. This will happen even if a user is successfully enrolled using a password containing DBCS characters. When using the install wizard, if the password contains any special characters you will receive an error message that states which character is invalid. For example, "Invalid text [%] entered". Notes: If you receive the message: "Invalid text [] entered)", the invalid character is the right parenthesis ( ) ). If you receive the message: "Invalid text [] entered", the invalid character is the comma ( , ).
First Name	All characters	n/a
Last Name	All characters	n/a