Case Sensitivity of Usernames, Groups and Roles

This page summarises the way Crowd handles case sensitivity for usernames, group names and role names when storing, matching and searching data and when passing data between directories and applications.

Terminology:

• Case insensitive — Upper-case and lower-case letters are assumed to have the same meaning: JSmith is the same as jsmith.
• Case preserving — Upper and lower case are retained when passing or storing information: JSmith remains JSmith.

Outside Crowd

External to Crowd:

• Most LDAP directory schemas specify the user, group and role names as case insensitive for matching and searching, but case preserving when storing the data and passing it back to the requestor.
• Applications behave in different ways. Some, like JIRA and Confluence, insist on lower-case usernames, groups and roles and store all user-related data in lower case.

The Crowd Solution

Crowd's application caches and LDAP directory caches are case insensitive but case preserving. Crowd will ignore case when comparing usernames, etc (JSmith = jsmith) and it will preserve case when passing information between applications and directories (JSmith remains JSmith).

In addition, Crowd Internal and Delegated Authentication directories:

• Store usernames in lower case only.
• Allow mixed-case groups and roles.
• Support case-insensitive matching and searching.

Importing Users, Groups and Roles into Crowd Internal Directories

When you import user information into a Crowd Internal or Delegated Authentication directory, the usernames will be converted to lower case.

Enforcing Lower-Case Usernames, Groups and Roles for an Application

In some cases you may wish to convert user, group and role names to lower case when passing them to an application. You can set an option for each application, as described in Enforcing Lower-Case Usernames, Groups and Roles for an Application. When the option is set, Crowd will convert upper-case and mixed-case information obtained from your user directory to lower case before passing the information to the application.

関連トピック

• Overview of Caching
• Managing Directories

Crowd Documentation