NW 73 Portal logon by use of email insted of UID?

Question

Hi UME Mapping Experts
I am trying to change the logon of a NW73 Portal to use email as logon ID instead of the default uniquie ID. I am using the portals dB as user storage.
I have tried to make a property mapping as below in the UME configuration file but it doesnu2019t work. Any idea which property name for logonid I should use as mapping?
<attributeMapping>
<principal type="user">
<nameSpace name="com.sap.security.core.usermanagement">
<attribute name="j_user">
<physicalAttribute name="email"/>*
</attribute>
</nameSpace>
</principal>
</attributeMapping>
I have tested the physical attribute u201Cemailu201D by mapping it to u201Cfirstnameu201D which works fine. I have also tried the following attributes: u201Clogonidu201D, u201Cj_usernameu201D, u201Clogonaliasu201D but none of them seems to work.
I guess it should be possible but any idea on how the mappings should be performed?
I have read a guide where it worked by using an LDAP but hopefully it should be able as well by use of the local dB as storage.
Thanks in advance
BR
John Stubbe

Answer 1

Hi John & Kumar,
First, Kumar's answer simply was wrong. The logical attribute is j_user, not j_username. Don't mix up the http parameter name with the logical attribute name...
Second, j_user is a logical attribute of the user account, not of the user itself. See http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73/helpdata/en/48/564dfe5c3e58d7e10000000a421937/frameset.htm for further details.
Third, in theory the mapping would have to be something like this:
<attributeMapping>
  <principal type="account">
    <nameSpace name="com.sap.security.core.usermanagement">
      <attribute name="j_user">
        <physicalAttribute name="email"/>
      </attribute>
      <attribute name="logonalias">
        <physicalAttribute name="email"/>
      </attribute>
    </nameSpace>
  </principal>
</attributeMapping>
If you compare this to other datasource xml's, you will see that one could think of additional mappings for userid (null) or loginid (pincipal type user, value null).
Anyhow, these changes - at least as far as I have checked it - lead to an invalid configuration: "Check as first Guest user id is not found No object found for first guest user id Guest". This happens while saving the config. If you upload the config via the config tool, similar errors appear during startup, which fails in the end ("User account for logonid "Guest" not found!").
I expect this to be a small limitation in the UME implementation. The guest user of the UME is accessed (and must be accessed) via it's ID, not via the mapping. So even if you give the guest user an email address and use this instead of "Guest" for ume.login.guest_user.uniqueids, it does not work.
I'm not 100% sure, but for me it seems that this does not work for the given reason for UME only. Of course this works for LDAP datasources, as the UME guest user is not affected by such settings.
Anyhow, alternatively, you could implement an additional login module which tries to look up the user id given as the mail address and searches for such users, if finding exactly one, checking the given password for this user. This I have done several years ago, it is not /that/ hard if you have some basic JAAS & UME develeopment knowledge.
Hope it helps
Detlev