Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Programming Interfaces

Specifying OpenEdge internal user IDs and passwords

OpenEdge internal user IDs and passwords define user identities for the OpenEdge internal authentication system, and they are used to specify a database connection ID. You must specify them in the _User table of each OpenEdge RDBMS using the user maintenance options of the Admin Security menu in the Data Administration and character-mode Data Dictionary tools (see the Data Administration online help). The following sections describe the conventions for specifying OpenEdge internal user IDs and passwords.

OpenEdge internal user IDs

An OpenEdge internal user ID is a string of up to 32 characters associated with a particular OpenEdge database connection. Like table names, OpenEdge internal user IDs must begin with a character from a–z or from A–Z. The name can consist of:

Alphabetic characters
Digits
The following special characters: # $ % & – _

OpenEdge internal user IDs are not case sensitive: they can be uppercase, lowercase, or any combination of these. You can establish the valid user IDs for a database through the OpenEdge Data Dictionary.

An OpenEdge internal user ID can be blank, written as the string, " ", but it cannot be defined as such through the Data Dictionary.

Passwords

An OpenEdge internal password is a string of up to 16 characters that is associated with a user ID. When you add a password through the Data Dictionary, the password is encoded with the ENCODE function. All OpenEdge internal passwords are case sensitive. So, ENCODE generates different values for uppercase and lowercase input.

When using ENCODE with passwords, PSC strongly recommends:

Occurrences of the ENCODE function related to the same password run in the same code page.
In environments with multiple code pages, programs use the CODEPAGE–CONVERT function so that occurrences of the ENCODE function related to the same password run in the same code page.