Changing Passwords and Customizing Messages

By Ben Naphtali

WebFOCUS can be implemented in a variety of environments and security infrastructures. What I think of as one of the underutilized abilities of WebFOCUS is the ability to change a password on a WebFOCUS Reporting Server, taking into account the policies and restrictions for those new passwords and to customize the messages returned. 

Some prerequisites

The usual place to change your password would be from the auto-signon screen
that is displayed when attempting to run a report against a WebFOCUS Reporting Server. 

This screen would be displayed either from one of several places – the ad hoc page, stored procedure page, MRE Applet and Business Intelligence Dashboard -- after you try to run a report and fail authentication. You can also change your password on the wfsignon.html page or a custom page like it. As long as the WebFOCUS Reporting Server is running with security on, and a default user ID and password were not set within the WebFOCUS Admin console, this page will be displayed.

By default, this display occurs because of a failed authentication against the WebFOCUS Reporting Server. When you attempt to run the report, there are no cookies set for the user ID and password, and an attempt is made to connect to the WebFOCUS Reporting Server without these credentials. If you viewed the edaprint.log from your server, you will see an authentication failure at that time. 

A few customers do not want to see failures like this in the edaprint.log, and chose to set the WF_AUTOSIGNON page to PREPROMPT. This setting is located within the WebFOCUS Administration console under the General section and can be set to YES, NO and PREPROMPT. YES is the default, PREPROMPT displays the auto-signon screen prior to connecting, and NO disables this functionality altogether.

To change the password on the auto-signon screen, all the user needs to do is type in their in a user ID and password using the following syntax:

OLDPASSWORD,NEWPASSWORD

The default delimiter to separate the old and new password is a comma, but this can be changed from the WFRS Administration console, under Workspace > Access Control > Others > password_change_delimiter. This allows any character to be the delimiter, but also means that the delimiter character cannot be used in a password. 

If the password does not conform to a current password policy, the following default error will be displayed:
ODIN_10 Error: New password not accepted

Let’s say this message is not informative enough or interactive enough for the application. This can be further configured/customized via the ENtemplate.xml file and the corresponding language-specific XXwebfoc_strings.lng files.

In fact, there are various error messages, some of which are returned from the WebFOCUS Reporting Server, in which the response and display from the client can be changed. As a brief overview, the XXwebfoc_strings.lng is a file that contains the language-specific messages that are displayed from within the ENtemplate.xml file.

XX is a two-character abbreviation of the language being used, EN=English, ES=Spanish, FR=French, etc. The ENtemplate.xml file consists of templates that are displayed when a certain error is displayed. Most of the communication-related errors displayed are from 32002 to 4000.

So within the ENtemplate.xml file, a response can be created for any of the errors that occur. In the case above, where a new password is entered that does not conform to the password policy, you would need to find the error number within the file (32036) and customize that particular HTML. There are other responses in that file, so copying an example will work as a first step.