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by Alex Wolff, New Breed Corp.

When it comes to adding new users to Lawson, it is a tedious and time-consuming process, involving 3 steps as outlined below:

• Add User at the OS Level
• Add User to Resource Manager and Set Attributes
• Tweak LAUA settings (Still required for 9.0.0.x)

Add User at the OS level

With UNIX you need to run the ‘useradd’ command. For 10 users or 100 users it is a pretty trivial exercise to create a UNIX script that can run the ‘useradd’ command within a loop for each user in a text file. I am sure it as easy on W2K3 as well.

Add User to Resource Manager

Adding users to Resource Manager and setting their attributes can be quite mind-numbing. At the very least you need to set the following attributes for each user:

• SSOPID
• OSID
• OSPassword
• Full Name
• First Name
• Last Name
• Check LS
• Group(s)
• Role(s)
• ProductLine
• Portal Role
• E-mail
• Custom Attribute(s)

Fig 1. Lawson’s “Change RM Object” screen for setting Lawson and Custom attributes.

loadusers to the Rescue!

Wouldn’t it be nice if Lawson provided a quick and easy way to mass add or change Users and their attributes? Actually, Lawson does; it is called the “loadusers” utility. Loadusers utility is a shell command that takes XML formatted data and uploads it into Resource Manager/LDAP and GEN. The utility itself is easy to run; just specify the following options and your done:

-f xmlfile
-p defaultProductline
-d defaultDomain (Windows Only)

The rest of this article goes into the details of the XML file format and shows sample JAVA code that can be used as methods to generate an XML file from a pipe-delimited text file.

XML file format

The general format for the XML file to be used with loadusers utility is shown in figure 2 below.

XML File Format for loadusers

Notice the ROLEDATA, GROUPDATA, IDENTITIES nodes? Those nodes hint at the fact that you can use the loadusers utility to add new ROLES, GROUPS, and IDENTITIES but I will not discuss those options here. I will just be concentrating on the node and child node of <USERDATA>.

Note: For a full explanation of the loadusers utility please refer to Chapter 15 in the “Lawson Administration: Resources and Security” manual (LSRDAG-90UWA-05).

There is one <USERDATA> node per file but there can be multiple <USER> nodes one for each user you want to upload. Attributes in Resource Manager translate into Node Attributes in the XML file as shown above. If you have defined custom attributes via Lawson’s Schema Editor then you can include them in the XML file as well. In my example above we have one custom attribute called “DataControl” used to store data we use to write security rules with.

The loadusers utility will parse and load attributes that can contain multiple values such as “Role” and “Group” if they are separated by a comma. One caveat though: With our version of the loadusers utility I was not able to load custom attribute data that contained multiple values (i.e. DataControl=”30100,30200,40500”). The record containing the multi-valued custom attribute would error out as shown below:

Figure 3. This is what happens when you try to load multi-valued custom attribute data. Lawson, can you please fix?

Creating the XML file

Creating the XML file in an efficient manner is the challenge. You could manually create the file but that would defeat the purpose. You need to create a utility that can read a simple input file and transform it to the XML format required by loadusers utility. There are dozens of language choices here, most modern languages like Perl, Java, VB have the constructs to create XML files that adhere to the Document Object Model (DOM) standard.

I chose to use JAVA since it has numerous classes to build DOM compliant document structures. I could easily have used Perl along with their XML::DOM package but I’ve made the switch to JAVA and I’ll never go back. VB/VB.net would also be an appropriate choice here and it could easily be integrated with Excel for the basic user data entry.

My source file for the user data would come from Excel via a pipe-delimited file. This would allow anybody to input the data using a well-known and understood GUI environment.

Figure 4. Sample Excel template for adding User Data.

The JAVA program would then read the file, process each record with id = 1, and create a <USER> node with each column becoming an Attribute. (Id’s 2 through 4 are used when I want to batch load ROLES, GROUPS or IDENTITIES.)

The resulting XML file is shown below:

Figure 5. A properly formatted XML document ready for’ loadusers’ utility.

At this point to actually add the user(s) to Lawson Security all you have to do is run the 'loadusers' utility:

Figure 6. Screenshot showing good outcome of running ‘loadusers’ utility.

Java Code Snippet

As with all my articles I like to include some code that can be used as a starting point for your own use. The below code snippet is a section of a simple JAVA program that converts the Pipe delimited data to XML. The main purpose of the code is to show you how easy it is to add Nodes, Child-Nodes and Attributes to create an XML document. Please be aware that I make no guarantees it will work with your system’s JAVA version and I will accept no liability for any code you develop based on this Article that may damage your Lawson ERP System.
 

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You can view other Tips & Tricks on LawsonGuru.com.

How does Lawson store "NULL" Dates?

When Lawson creates database tables to store data, columns are always defined as NOT NULL.  For date columns, this means that an "empty" date must be stored somehow.  However the various third-party databases do not support 00/00/0000 as valid dates.  So Lawson converts 00/00/0000 to the "earliest" date supported by the various databases:
 

This is important to understand when you need to use date selection using a third-party tool, such as Crystal Reports, using the native database as the data source.