Case Sensitivity of Usernames and Groups
This page summarizes the way Crowd handles case sensitivity for usernames and group 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:
JSmithis the same asjsmith. - Case preserving — Upper and lower case are retained when passing or storing information:
JSmithremainsJSmith.
Outside Crowd
External to Crowd:
- Most LDAP directory schemas specify the user and group 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 and groups 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:
- Are case preserving, i.e. they store usernames and group names in mixed case.
- Support case-insensitive matching and searching.
Importing Users and Groups into Crowd Internal Directories
When you import user information into a Crowd Internal or Delegated Authentication directory, the case of usernames and group names will be preserved.
Enforcing Lower-Case Usernames and Groups for an Application
In some cases you may wish to convert user and group 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 and Groups 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.