Remember User & Password not there in GP 2018?

Recently I had upgraded my TEST bed system from GP 2016R2 to 2018. After the upgrade I noticed that my auto-login feature was gone and though it bugged me, I had more important things to check before that ‘small’ annoyance..

A couple of weeks into the new release, and after I installed the Rockton Toolbox for GP that was just release last week which still requires you to claim the new registration keys from the support, I noticed myself that I need to dig into the issue with login & password not retained anymore.

As you can see from the login screen above, the check box and text for the feature are greyed out and can’t be selected.  I knew that from my past GP releases, that this was a setup that has to be enabled in the GP Setup under  “Administration >> Setup >> System >> System Preferences”

In GP 2013R2 this looked like this :

And this is in GP 2018 :

Looks pretty similar right ? aside of an added section at the bottom, the feature remains the same.  The thing is that checking or unchecking this box does actually two things :

1. update a value in the DYNAMICS..SY01402 table to retain the status
2. Alter the flag in the DEX.ini file to make the option available at login time (remember, before you logged in, no DB access ! )

You can query the actual value to confirm this by running this SQL code :

SELECT *FROM SY01402 WHERE USERID = 'GLOBALUSER' AND syDefaultType = 71

Now this is were  the problem happens.. In my GP2013R2, this works as expected.. meaning that if the option has never been used before, checking the box in GP sets the value AND adds the following entry in the DEX.ini file :

RememberUser=TRUE

It doesn’t matter where it sits, as long as it’s in the DEX.ini and GP can read it out during the launch process, and it will make the ‘Remember User & Password’ available to check in the login screen. Keep in mind that GP can’t read any SQL table data before you’re actually login into the system, thus relying on the configuration file.

By default, this entry doesn’t exist in the DEX.in and is only added once you check the box in GP. During an upgrade process, a new DEX.ini is created within the new folder location of GP under the \Data sub-folder and many settings are set to default, but this one is not there.

@SteveEndow from Precipio Services had blogged about this in details here in 2015, but what he didn’t mentioned (or knew), is that there is another DEX.ini entry that could have a significant impact on the ‘Remember User’ feature:

EnablePerUserIni=TRUE

This feature was introduced with release of GP 2013 for the newly added web client to store individual user settings without having a common DEX.ini file.. Now the thing is that if this is set to TRUE, GP is going to store most of the regular DEX.ini entries in a SQL table, not in a flat file anymore. Each user ID in GP would get anywhere between 10 to 50 entries with the key field name & it’s corresponding value  See an example below from table DYNAMICS..SY01405 :

USERID  IniKeyName           IniKeyValue
dummy   Dictionary Version   18.00.0400
dummy   RememberUser         TRUE

@MarianoGomez too has blogged about the new values in the DEX.ini in 2014, but he wasn’t providing any technical details about how these two different entries would work together in the case of a shared and individual DEX.ini file..

What I got confirmed by Microsoft’s Daryl Anderson is that if the EnablePerUserIni=TRUE entry is present in the DEX.ini file, then GP will only look at the table entry for the RememberUser settings.. which brings us back to the old question: which came first ? the chicken or the egg ?

As I haven’t tested my GP 2018  setup on a workstation yet, but only on the server side, and if the web client is selected as an option , the entry EnablePerUserIni=TRUE is added to the configuration file and thus, it never gets a chance to receive the other parameter (RememberUser),  no matter how hard you try from the GP client side.

The only solution for now when this happens, is to edit the DEX.ini file, hunt down the entry EnablePerUserIni=TRUE, and switch the value to FALSE (or remove the entry completely if you don’t intend to use the web client). While you’re there, you can add at the same time RememberUser=TRUE, which will save you another login into GP before this works.

Finally a happy camper again and now I can check the box again on my login screen :-).
Enjoy your GP until next time,
@GP_Beat

 

Advertisement