Forum .LRN Q&A: Deleting users and renaming items

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1: Deleting users and renaming items
Posted by Maxim Burgerhout on 08/26/02 08:49 PM
I feel silly having to ask this here, but how can I:
a. delete users
b. rename items
Ad. a. Deleting seems to have worked, but now I see Pending ($amount_of_deleted_users) when I open /dotlrn/admin/users. There are no users listed there, however... Also, the folders with files belonging to those users haven't been deleted (perhaps on purpose). I want those gone, though.
Ad. b. I have renamed a subject in my dotLRN site. I also renamed some user (typo) and some other things. The renaming hasn't been totally consequent. Not all of the instances of those names now carry the new name. Is this a bug, or meant to be like this?

Sorry for my ignorance: when I get the hang of this system, I might start helping the community out by writing some stuff on using dotLRN. Who know's: I might even begin learning tcl :)
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2: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/26/02 11:01 PM
When we delete or ban a user we are just chaning thier member state not removing them from the database. Thus all thier content will remain intact and it is a reversable action.

Totally deleting a user from the database we are calling "nuke".  Sloan has written nuke for a newly registered user that has never been approved as a dotlrn user. I dont' think this has been rolled back into the dotLRN yet but it will be eventaully.

Renaming: dotLNR allows instances of classes to have different names from the subject. So if you change the subject name previously created classes will not change names.

dotLRN also allows editing of the file storage folder names for a class so if you change the class name it will not automatically change the file storage folder names.

Hope that helps.

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3: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Ben Koot on 08/27/02 12:14 AM
I suport M.B's question. I have had a few situations whereby a user specifically asked to have every reference to her name deleted from the sytem (ACS 3.25) , and I couldn't. I can only assume it has something to do with database issues, but would love to know why it is not possible to delete an e-mail address and all related references permanently. Sorry if it sounds stupid.
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4: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 08/27/02 12:18 AM
It actually should be allowed. All that needs to happen is to add a generic user called deleted user or something and change all references to that user_id to the generic deleted user.

There has been a lot of aversion to this simple solution but you are correct that if a user doesn't want to be involved they should be able to be expunged. It will probably take some core hacking to get it to work perfectly though.

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5: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 08/27/02 02:08 AM

MB, I noticed the renaming problem when I changed course names and reported it in the Bug Tracker (1). The problem does not seem to be isolated (urls, course names in the news/bboard "my Space" portlets, etc.), but never fear... in another post (2) Arjun from Open Force did say that he would be looking at this.

1. http://dotlrn.openforce.net/bugs/bug?bug%5fnumber=13
2. https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0005Nw

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6: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Maxim Burgerhout on 08/27/02 09:55 AM
Is there perhaps a sollution for the Pending(2) problem? Or is that truly a bug?

Thanks for all the help, btw, it's starting to make sense :)

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7: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/27/02 03:21 PM
Hi MB,

Glad things are starting to make sense. :) Maybe I haven't had enough coffee but which exactly is the pending bug.  Not that I'm questioning its there but we have fixed some bugs and changed the UI quite a bit in this area, so I'm actually not that clear on how the OF version works right now.  We'd love to roll the changes back in but we are waiting for the TAB to exist so there is a mechanism to do so. Meanwhile, anyone who wants to work in this area send me an email and I'll send you our code.

BTW: I mean't my discussion of deleting users to reflect my understanding how the current system works, not my belifs about how it *should* work.  I don't disagree that it would be nice to be able to really delete users. I'd also like to be able to merge two accounts.

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8: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 08/27/02 06:13 PM
MB: could you explain the "pending" problem in more detail.

Carl: do you have the latest code? all the applets now have change_event_handler/rename procs. to rename things that they created like the default file storage folder. but there will be things that the applets should not be able to rename, such as the content of custom portlets. on my system, the "groups" portlet, fs, forums, seem to be working as expected. but there are a couple of issues:
the major one is that the URL is not changed yet, so any code that
relies on the URL to display the name (breadcrumbs, i think) will show the old name. It may not be too difficult to move around site-nodes in this way, but i haven't gotten to trying it out.

If you are updated to the latest code, it would be helpful if you made a list of all the places you see the renaming not occuring and append it to the existing ticket.

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9: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 08/27/02 10:06 PM
Arjun, I just took a quick look on Collaboraid's server that does a nighlty  automatic install (thanks to work by Peter and Tilmann!) and some of the problems with renaming that I have noticed still hold true. I will append what I find to the existing ticket.
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10: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Maxim Burgerhout on 08/29/02 11:10 AM
Quote: could you explain the "pending" problem in more detail.

Okay, the (not really serious) "problem" is this: I have deleted 2 users. Now when I open /dotlrn/admin/users, I see this:
[Externals (0) | Professor (2) | Staff (3) | Student (1) | Pending (2) | Deactivated (0)]

The deleted users seem to have transformed into Pending Users. There are, however no users listed when I click Pending...
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11: Response to Deleting users and renaming items (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/29/02 04:26 PM
Pending users will make more sense if you take out the line:

  and membership_rels.member_state = 'approved'
in    <fullquery name="select_non_dotlrn_users">
in all the users-chunk-small/medium/large-yourdbhere.xql

Then you will see unapproved users and suddenly realize you want to create a oneclick "approve and make a dotlrn" user link.