Some Java, JEE and WebSphere stuffs | Something about JEE and WebSphere. Java, JEE and WebSphere tips and tutorials

Compiled JSP source location in WebSphere Commerce.

Do you know the location of the compiled JSP source file in WebSphere Commerce? WebSphere Commerce stores all the generated Java source files from the JSP, not just the class files. This is really helpful if you want to debug your JSP code, and do not know where exactly the error occurs. The location of compiled JSP source file is

WC_INSTALL_DIR\wasprofile\temp\localhost\server1\WC\Stores.war\

WC_INSTALL_DIR is the location where you have installed your WebSphere Commerce. wasprofile is the name of your WebSphere Application Server profile. In the server environments the value will be different (for me in WebSphere Commerce Developer 7, the profile location is wasprofile)

Resetting a store in WebSphere Commerce Developer

The initial WebSphere Commerce Developer setup contains some pre published starter store data. If you do not want to work with the pre published starter store data, you can reset the database and the workspace using resetdb utility

Syntax:
resetdb.bat

The resetdb will delete all the published stores and you will have only one store with store id 0 after running this utility. However if you want your published stores, but want to go back to the original configuration without any customizations you made, use resetstores utility.

Syntax
resetstores.bat

Refer to the following technote  if you see a MissingResorceException after reseting the stores.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21441430

Retrieving Merchant Key value from WebSphere Commerce Server

Merchant Key

The merchant key is the encryption key used in WebSphere Commerce Server. Merchant key is a 16 digit hexadecimal number that has at least one numeric character, at least one alphabetic character (a-f) with no upper case letter. The merchant key cannot contain the same character more than four times and four consecutive occurrence of the same character is not allowed. The merchant key will be present in WebSphere commerce instance xml file in encrypted format. To get the plain text version of the merchant key, place the following text in any WCS view and run it on the server.

<%
	System.out.println("Merchant Key :"+com.ibm.commerce.server.ConfigProperties.singleton().getMerchantKey());
%>

Resetting user password in WCS

There will be situations where you may have forgotten the password of a user and you want to reset the password in WCS. In WebSphere Commerce all the passwords are one way encrypted with a salt and Merchant Key. The main purpose of a salt is to add more security to storing passwords. With the help of Salt during encrypting the password, WCS makes sure that two users that have the same password will not have the same encrypted string as their password.

Reset by updating DB
Resetting the password is easy if you already know the password of at least one user. For e.g.: if you already know the password of user with users_id 9000 and you want to reset the password of user with users_id = 9001, then execute the following query in the database.

UPDATE USERREG SET LOGONPASSWORD = (SELECT LOGONPASSWORD FROM USERREG WHERE USERS_ID = 9000), SALT = (SELECT SALT FROM USERREG WHERE USERS_ID = 9000), PASSWORDINVALID= (SELECT PASSWORDINVALID FROM USERREG WHERE USERS_ID = 9000), STATUS = (SELECT STATUS FROM USERREG WHERE USERS_ID = 9000) WHERE USERS_ID=9001;

Now user 9001 can login with user 9000′s password. In the above case we copied the details like salt, logonpassword etc of user 9000 to user 9001

Reset with the help of wcs_password utility.
Consider case where you do not know the password any of the users. Now to reset the password you need to generate the password by yourself. To generate the encrypted password for any string, WCS has a utility, ‘wcs_password’. wcs_password utility takes three parameter as the input. The syntax for wcs_password utility is given below

wcs_password <password> <salt> <key>

Where password is the new password, salt is the salt for the user and key is the Merchant Key

Once we provide all these details, the command will give the encrypted password in both ASCII and hex format. Take the ASCII formatted string and update the USERREG.LOGONPASSWORD column with that value. E.g.: The SQL to update the password for wcsadmin is given below

update userreg set logonpassword='output of wcs_password utility' where logonid = 'wcsadmin'

Now you can login with the new password.

The wcs_password.bat utility will be available in your bin directory.

Reset with chgwcspwd utility
The third way of resetting the password is with the help of chgwcspwd utility. This utility changes the password directly in the db. So we do not need to execute any SQL commands by our own. But this tool is available only in IBM iSeries. So I have not tried this yet. The syntax to use this utility is

chgwcspwd.sh -database <dbname> -dbHostname <db host name> -schema <schema name> -instance <instance name> -instancePwd <db password>-merKey <key> -wcsUser <wcs username> -wcsUserPwd <user's new password>

Finding the version of WebSphere Commerce Developer.

Have you ever came across a situation like you want to know the version of WebSphere Commerce Product you are using and have no idea where to look for? I had. I know how to do this in WebSphere Commerce Developer 5.6.1 and the previous versions but not in WCS 6.

So to find the location of WebSphere Commerce Developer’s version, go to %WC_DEVELOPER_INSTALl_DIR%\properties\version\ and open file COMMERCE.product. In this file you can see a tag named version. This tag will have the version of WebSphere Commerce we are using.