Enabling special characters for user ID and username

Starting in Maximo® Application Suite 9.0.2, you can include special characters for user ID and username. User IDs and username can typically contain only alphanumeric characters and some special characters. However, you can enable Maximo Application Suite the use of all special characters by updating the custom resource file in Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform.

About this task

If you are using earlier versions of Maximo Application Suite, you can enable special characters for user ID and username in Maximo Application Suite 8.10.17 and 8.11.14.

By default, user IDs and usernames can contain only alphanumeric characters and the underscore (_), hyphen (-), at (@) and period (.) special characters.

As an alternative, if you install Maximo Application Suite by using a command-line interface (CLI), you can enable special characters by entering Yes to the prompt Do you want to allow special characters for user IDs and usernames?.

If you are upgrading to 8.10, 8.11 or 9.0, and users include special characters in their user IDs or usernames, enable the use of all special characters before you upgrade.

Procedure

In the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform console, in the Administration section, select Custom Resource Definitions.
In the CustomResourcesDefinitions window, select the Suite CR file.
On the Instances tab, select the instance that you want to update.
On the YAML tab for the instance, add the userDataValidation section, and enter the value for the allowSpecialChars property as True.
If you set allowSpecialChars to True, users can include special characters in their user IDs and usernames.
```
spec:
  settings:
    userDataValidation:
      allowSpecialChars: True
```
Save the custom resource changes.

What to do next

Attention: Maximo Application Suite

If usernames include the opening bracket ([), users might not be able to log in. If you are upgrading from Maximo Asset Management to Maximo Application Suite, you can change the username to remove any opening brackets after the upgrade.
In Maximo Application Suite 8.10.x and 8.11.x, if special characters are used in the user id or username, you cannot access IBM Watson® IoT Platform.

If you import multiple users by using the .csv template and use double bytes characters, save the file as CSV UTF-8 format.

If you later change the allowSpecialChars property from True to False, unexpected behavior might occur.