Authentication Manager 8.9 and newer
Authentication Manager Bulk Administration (AMBA)
You have an AMBA input file that has commas as part of the data. While AMBA has always treated a comma as a field delimiter only, there was no way to format the data so that a comma can be part of the data within AMBA.
A standard AMBA input file would look like this:
Action,LastName,DefLogin,UserPwd,EnableFlag,SetPin,Email
CAUP,Smith,"Smith,Joe1",Abcdef123!,TRUE,99000001,smithjoe1@securidcs.net
CAUP,Smith,'Smith,Joe2',Abcdef123!,TRUE,99000001,smithjoe2@securidcs.net
CAUP,Smith,Smith","Joe3,Abcdef123!,TRUE,99000001,smithjoe3@securidcs.net
However, this would not work since the username is in the format "Lastname,Firstname." Running this script would create three users with the lastnames "Smith and 'Smith and Smith" since the comma would always be the field separator.
The data input file must be reformatted to allow commas within the data fields themselves.
In Authentication Manager 8.9, we can alter the header row to use a space as a field separator, and double-quotes to encapsulate data fields:
"Action" "LastName" "DefLogin" "UserPwd" "EnableFlag" "SetPin" "Email"
CAUP Smith "Smith,Joe1" Abcdef123! TRUE 99000001 smithjoe1@securidcs.net
CAUP Smith 'Smith,Joe2' Abcdef123! TRUE 99000001 smithjoe2@securidcs.net
CAUP Smith Smith","Joe3 Abcdef123! TRUE 99000001 smithjoe3@securidcs.net
In this second example, because we have used standard double-quotes (meaning " " as opposed to “ ” or “smart quotes”) to separate the header row, we have invoked RFC-4180 and are now using quotes to define and spaces to delimit our data. As a result, we get three users created as follows:
If you already have a comma-delimited AMBA input file, a shell script is available that wraps each value in quotes and changes every comma to a space, except commas that are already inside quotes.
- Copy the file called escape_quotes.sh to the same directory as your AMBA file.
- Make it executable by running the following command:
chmod 755 escape_quotes.sh
- Invoke the script by running the following command:
./escape_quotes.sh
- When prompted, give it the name of the file you want to convert from CSV to quote-escaped.
- The new file will be written to the same directory, with the same filename followed by .quoted:
You can use this new file as the source for running AMBA.
