Known limitations

If you are developing globalized apps, the following restrictions apply:

• Partial translation: Part of the product IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation V8.0.0, including its documentation, is translated in the following languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish. User-facing text is translated.
• Bidirectional support: The applications that are generated by IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation are not fully bidirectional enabled. Mirroring of the graphic user interface (GUI) elements and the control of the text direction are not provided by default. However, no hard dependency exists from the generated applications on this limitation. It is possible for the developers to achieve full bidi compliance by manual adjustments in the generated code.

  Although translation into Hebrew is provided for IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation core functionality, some GUI elements are not mirrored.

• Constraints on adapter names: Names of adapters must be valid names to create a Java™ class name. In addition, they must be composed only of the following characters:
  • Uppercase and lowercase letters (A-Z and a-z)
  • Digits (0-9)
  • Underscore (_)
• Unicode characters: Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane are not supported.
• Language sensitivity and Unicode Normalization Forms: In the following use cases, queries do not consider language sensitivity such as normal matching, accent-insensitive, case-insensitive, and 1-to-2 mapping for the search function to run correctly in different languages, and search on data does not use Normalization Form C (NFC).
  • From the MobileFirst Analytics Console, when you create a custom filter for a custom chart. However, in this console, the message property uses Normalization Form C (NFC) and considers language sensitivity.
  • From the MobileFirst Operations Console, when you search for an application in the Browse Applications page, for an adapter in the Browser Adapters page, for a tag in the Push page, or a device on the Devices page.
  • In the Find functions for the JSONStore API.

IBM MobileFirst Analytics

The IBM MobileFirst Analytics has the following limitations:

• Security analytics (data on requests failing security checks) is not supported.
• In MobileFirst Analytics Console, the format for numbers does not follow the International Components for Unicode (ICU) rules.
• In MobileFirst Analytics Console, the numbers do not use the user's preferred number script.
• In MobileFirst Analytics Console, the format for dates, times, and numbers are displayed according to the language setting of the operating system rather than the locale of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
• When you create a custom filter for a custom chart, the numerical data must be in base 10, Western, or European numerals, such as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
• When you create an alert in the Alert Management page of MobileFirst Analytics Console, the numerical data must be in base 10, Western, or European numerals, such as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
• The Analytics page of the MobileFirst Operations Console supports the following browsers:
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer version 10 or later
  • Mozilla Firefox ESR or later
  • Apple Safari on iOS version 7.0 or later
  • Google Chrome latest version
• The Analytics client SDK is not available for Windows.

IBM MobileFirst Platform Application Center mobile client

The Application Center mobile client follows the cultural conventions of the running device, such as the date formatting. It does not always follow the stricter International Components for Unicode (ICU) rules.

IBM MobileFirst Platform Operations Console

The MobileFirst Operations Console has the following limitations:

• Provides only partial support for bidirectional languages.
• The text direction cannot be changed when notification messages are sent to an Android device:
  • If the first letters typed are in a right-to-left language, such as Arabic and Hebrew, the whole text direction is automatically right-to-left.
  • If the first letters typed are in a left-to-right language, the whole text direction is automatically left-to-right.
  The sequence of characters and text alignment do not match cultural fashion in the bidirectional language.
• The numeric fields do not parse numeric values according to the formatting rules of the locale. The console displays formatted numbers but accept as input only raw (unformatted) numbers. For example: 1000, not 1 000, or 1,000.

Server Configuration Tool

The Server Configuration Tool has the following restrictions:

• The descriptive name of a server configuration can contain only characters that are in the system character set. On Windows, it is the ANSI character set.
• Passwords that contain single quotation mark or double quotation mark characters might not work correctly.
• The console of the Server Configuration Tool has the same globalization limitation as the Windows console to display strings that are out of the default code page.

You might also experience restrictions or anomalies in various aspects of globalization because of limitations in other products, such as browsers, database management systems, or software development kits in use. For example:

• You must define the user name and password of the Application Center with ASCII characters only. This limitation exists because WebSphere® Application Server (full or Liberty profiles) does not support non-ASCII passwords and user names. See Characters that are valid for user IDs and passwords.
• On Windows:
  • To see any localized messages in the log file that the test server creates, you must open this log file with the UTF8 encoding.
  These limitations exist because of the following causes:
  • The test server is installed on WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile, which creates log file with the ANSI encoding except for its localized messages for which it uses the UTF8 encoding.
• In Java 7.0 Service Refresh 4-FP2 and previous versions, you cannot paste Unicode characters that are not part of the Basic Multilingual Plane into the input field. To avoid this issue, create the path folder manually and choose that folder during the installation.
• Custom title and button names for the alert, confirm, and prompt methods must be kept short to avoid truncation at the edge of the screen.
• JSONStore does not handle normalization. The Find functions for the JSONStore API do not take account of language sensitivity such as accent insensitive, case insensitive, and 1-to-2 mapping.

The following known limitations apply when you use the FIPS 140-2 feature in IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation:

• This FIPS 140-2 validated mode applies only to the protection (encryption) of local data that is stored by the JSONStore feature and protection of HTTPS communications between the MobileFirst client and the MobileFirst Server.
  • For HTTPS communications, only the communications between the MobileFirst client and the MobileFirst Server use the FIPS 140-2 libraries on the client. Direct connections to other servers or services do not use the FIPS 140-2 libraries.
• This feature is only supported on the iOS and Android platforms.
  • On Android, this feature is only supported on devices or simulators that use the x86 or armeabi architectures. It is not supported on Android using armv5 or armv6 architectures. The reason is because the OpenSSL library used did not obtain FIPS 140-2 validation for armv5 or armv6 on Android. FIPS 140-2 is not supported on 64-bit architecture even though the MobileFirst library does support 64-bit architecture. FIPS 140-2 can be run on 64-bit devices if the project includes only 32-bit native NDK libraries.
  • On iOS, it is supported on i386, x86_64, armv7, armv7s, and arm64 architectures.
• This feature works with hybrid applications only (not with native applications).
• For native iOS, FIPS is enabled through the iOS FIPS libraries and is enabled by default. No action is required to enable FIPS 140-2.
• The use of the user enrollment feature on the client is not supported by the FIPS 140-2 feature.
• The Application Center client does not support the FIPS 140-2 feature.

For more information about this feature, see FIPS 140-2 support.

An LTPA token is associated with the current user session. If the session expires before an LTPA token expires, a new session is created automatically. However, when an LTPA token expires before a user session expires, the following exception occurs:

com.ibm.websphere.servlet.session.UnauthorizedSessionRequestException: SESN0008E: A user authenticated as anonymous has attempted to access a session owned by {user name}

To resolve this limitation, you must force the user session to expire when the LTPA token expires.

• On WebSphere Application Server Liberty, set the httpSession attribute invalidateOnUnauthorizedSessionRequestException to true in the server.xml file.
• On WebSphere Application Server, add the session management custom property InvalidateOnUnauthorizedSessionRequestException with the value true to fix the issue.

To update the cordova-ios platform of a Cordova app, you must uninstall and reinstall the platform by completing the following steps:

1. Navigate to the project directory for the app by using the command-line interface.
2. Run the cordova platform rm ios command to remove the platform.
3. Run the cordova platform add ios@version command to add the new platform to the app, where version is the version of the Cordova iOS platform.
4. Run the cordova prepare command to integrate the changes.

The update fails if you use the cordova platform update ios command.

To circumvent this issue, run the following command in your Cordova project.

cordova plugin add https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugins.git#master:wkwebview-engine-localhost

Existing code snippet:

(void)wlInitDidCompleteSuccessfully
{ 
UIViewController* rootViewController = self.window.rootViewController; 
// Create a Cordova View Controller 
CDVViewController* cordovaViewController = [[CDVViewController alloc] init] ; 
cordovaViewController.startPage = [[WL sharedInstance] mainHtmlFilePath]; 
// Adjust the Cordova view controller view frame to match its parent view bounds 
cordovaViewController.view.frame = rootViewController.view.bounds; 
// Display the Cordova view [rootViewController addChildViewController:cordovaViewController]; 
[rootViewController.view addSubview:cordovaViewController.view]; 
[cordovaViewController didMoveToParentViewController:rootViewController]; 
}

Recommended code snippet with workaround for the limitation:

(void)wlInitDidCompleteSuccessfully
{
 // Create a Cordova View Controller 
CDVViewController* cordovaViewController = [[CDVViewController alloc] init] ; 
cordovaViewController.startPage = [[WL sharedInstance] mainHtmlFilePath]; 
[self.window setRootViewController:cordovaViewController]; 
[self.window makeKeyAndVisible];
}