ID and password character limitations
The character limitations provided here apply to...
- IBM WebSphere Portal administrator
- IBM WebSphere Application Server administrator
- database administrator
- LDAP server administrator
- User IDs
Check database and LDAP server product documentation for any further restrictions.
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 we are able to enter.
We can specify other characters in the given name and surname fields.
Portal cannot create user IDs or passwords containing spaces, though it fully supports any existing user IDs and passwords, or those IDs created in the user repository, containing spaces.
Under normal circumstances a valid user ID and password can contain the following characters:
- Lowercase characters {a-z}
- Uppercase characters {A-Z}
- Numbers {0-9}
- Exclamation point {!}
- Open parenthesis {(}
- Close parenthesis {)}
- Dash {-} (Not supported as the first character)
- Period {.} (Not supported as the first character)
- Underscore {_} (Only supported special character in IBM i)
- Grave accent {`}
- Tilde {~}
- Commercial at {@} (Not supported creating Portal and WAS administrator during installation)
The only supported characters in IBM i are lowercase characters, uppercase characters, numbers, and the underscore.
These characters are all ASCII characters. Non-ASCII characters are not allowed for user name or password.
To use non-ASCII-based encoding, ensure the JVM has the correct generic arguments specific for the non-ASCII-based encoding. For example, for UTF-8 encoding, add the following two parameters to the JVM generic arguments for WebSphere Portal:
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
-Dclient.encoding.override=UTF-8If a fully qualified user ID contains a space; for example:
cn=wpsadmin,cn=users,l=SharedLDAP,c=US,ou=Lotus,o=Software Group,dc=ibm,dc=com
...place the fully qualified user ID in the properties file, or into a parent properties file, instead of as a flag on the command line. For example, create a parent properties file called...
mysecurity.properties
..enter the fully qualified user ID, and then run the task:
./ConfigEngine.sh task_name -DparentProperties=/opt/mysecurity.properties.
For Windows, if the fully qualified user ID contains a space place quotations around the fully qualified user ID before running the task; for example..."cn=wpsadmin,cn=users,l=SharedLDAP,c=US,ou=Lotus,o=Software Group,dc=ibm,dc=com"
The previous characters are true if the user.UNIQUEID.charset parameter 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. See the Puma Validation Service for information about further parameters that can be modified to affect the behavior of Portal's validation of users, groups, and passwords.