When to use ConvertPasswordToUpperCase flag?

[Former Member]

Howdy,

Our software product uses SAP .NET connector to exchange data with SAP. The end user needs to specify logon fields such as hostname, username, password, system number, etc. The user saves this information, along with some other information, as documents.

We just moved our code to use version 2.0.1 from 2.0 of .NET connector and things stopped working :-(. We got into invalid username/password error, an issue that has already been discussed on this forum. It turns out version 2.0 was not case sensitive about the passwords and the new version is.

This change will break all the documents for our existing customers when they upgrade our product.

Q1. When a document is loaded, we know the version number the document was created with. As part of automatic conversion, my thought is that we must simply convert existing passwords to uppercase. Will this work?

Q2. When the user tries to create a new connection, we display our UI for hostname, username, password, etc. Logically, it doesn't make sense for us to ask a new queston - "Do you wish to convert the password to uppercase?" They might as well type the password in uppercase. What do you think the right behavior should be?

Q3. Under what circumstances one must use Destination.ConvertPasswordToUppercase flag?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Pradeep

[reiner_hille-doering]

Q1: Yes.

Q2: See Q3:

Q3: This property is exactly indentend to allow backward compatibility easily.

Wire this property to an AppSettings entry in your config file. Set it to true for "old backends". This will automatically convert the entered passwords to uppercase to make the new version behave like the old version.

[Former Member]

Reiner,

I appreciate your help.

Your suggested solution works great if the end user was always connecting to just one SAP system. However, from our product, end users may connect to multiple SAP systems, some of which are new and some are old. I cannot use an appsetting entry to control this.

Adding a check box on the UI is also ugly :-(.

SAP GUI seems to deal with this automatically. When I connect to old systems, it knows that password has to be converted to uppercase. What magic is it playing?

Again, thank you very much for your help. Your points are on your way ;-).

Pradeep

[reiner_hille-doering]

Unfortunately I have no idea how SAPGUI does this. But a possible solution still is config file: just maintain a list of settings with diffent flags for the "state" of the system.