About that BMXAA7901E message...

Body

Too long for a tweet, not appropriate for a Tech Note, but still technical... a blog post!

I recently had a call with a client regarding the BMXAA7901E login failure message.

During their validation testing, they thought that Maximo was not displaying the correct message on the login page for certain conditions. In all cases, Maximo displays BMXAA7901E - You cannot log in at this time. Contact the system administrator. He had expected different messages, based on why the login failed, and what messages were available in the MAXMESSAGES table (which may be edited in the Database Configuration and Application Designer applications):

• User enters incorrect username/password combination: BMXAA0058E - The user name and password combination is incorrect. Enter a valid username and password.
•  User enters correct username/password combination, but account is blocked: BMXAA3862E - Your User ID has been blocked from the system. Please contact your system administrator.

He knew that the standard BMXAA7901E message is an intentional obfuscation of the exact reason why a user is unable to log in, and wanted to know what changes he could make to ensure that the correct message is displayed.

I told him that the messages are not incorrect, but that they are not used anymore, for the reason explained in the tech note at the end of this post.  Why were the messages still listed? Because Out of the Box Maximo maxmessageid records that are no longer used (in this case, BMXAA0058E and BMXAA3862E) are not deleted or reused by update scripts. We leave that to you.

By design, the current Maximo business object code that handles authentication always points to the obfuscatory message. It cannot be turned off or redirected based on the reason for login failure. See the tech note BMXAA7901E - You cannot log in at this time. Contact the system administrator.