Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Beware of the login attribute length limitation in WebSphere Portal

Beware of the login attribute limitation of 32 characters in length in WebSphere Portal 6.0 using WCM and when connecting to Java Content Repository (JCR) which is nothing but PDM (Portal Document Manager). So when designing and choosing a login attribute ( uid, cn , samAccountName, email) for your portal application you should carefully select or enforce the attribute in such a way that it's not more than 32 characters in length. This really makes the life difficult as you can't even use the basic email address as your login attribute as there is a possibility that some valid email addresses will easily more than characters for example, the world's richest Warren Buffet warren.buffet@berkshirehathaway.com can't even register with your website. Good news to all this is that they support upto 175 character length in the newer WebSphere Portal 6.1 release.

Certain symptoms you might notice are that users with more than 32 characters of login id might complain about missing images or document that is referred in the webpage from PDM or WCM and you might see the following exception in the logs during their login.


Error logging in: com.ibm.content.exception.LoginException:
javax.jcr.LoginException: Unable to establish session with DB2® Content
Manger Runtime Edition for User

2 comments:

**wen** said...

Cuando sucede este tipo de error, ¿QuĂ© es lo que puede hacerse para solucionar el problema?

onewebclick said...

Like i said you will see the following JCR exception in the logs , other symptoms aer that if you have reference to PDM images in yo portlets or themes you won;t see those images showing up, The only way is to upgrade to WebSphere Portal 6.1 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/genservers/portal/upgrade.html which is atleast available now is supporting more than 32 characters.