Invalid password error when password had special characters with Web Viewer 12.1

Products

• Output Management Web Viewer

Issue/Introduction

User could use the TSO, VTAM, CICS 3270 interfaces today successfully but the Web Viewer product kept rejecting it with an invalid password error.  The user had a special character in his password that obviously Web Viewer did not like.  Had user change to another special character and it fixed his issue.

What are the anomalies between valid characters for these two products?  View and Web Viewer 12.1 would also like to know if release 14.0 for Web viewer has the any differences too?

Environment

• Output Management Web Viewer 12.1
• View®
• Output Management View® for z/OS
• HP Passport Emulator

Cause

Web Viewer 12.1 and release 14 do not support any keyboard character input other than the standard keyboard using the code page defined for the user computer.  The HP Passport emulator in this case uses key mapping to change the keyboard characters and cannot be supported.  

Resolution

Normally, the Latin Windows codepage 1252 is being used by Web Viewer 12.1 and 14 for input.  For 12.1, DRAS uses the 037 or 1140 EBCDIC codepages for single byte character set support.  Web Viewer 14 will use the Unicode versions of the code pages.

 

The users are using Passport for all input and the "bar" or "|" character is being represented by a key mapped bracket "]" character for the Single Signon password which cannot be correctly passed to the Latin EBCDIC code page for translation, resulting in invalid passwords and revoked user IDs. The users will be told to refrain from using any Passport special key mapped characters for input to sign into Web Viewer and the View Repositories.