Forum OpenACS Development: User account Merge (UM)

Hi everyone,

"This is a good place to be if you're interested in undoing the damage done when the same person registers twice with two different email addresses or We can have duplicated accounts since more than one system manage one user account as different person"

The aim is that one person has to have only one account.

So, we have three scenarios:

1. Merge the Applications Items :
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We have to move the items of each package (faqs,news, bboards, etc...) that the duplicated account owns to the good account. In this scenario, we have two possibles solutions : Service Contracts or Dynamic Queries.

1.1. Service Contracts : Here we need to write the implementation per each package. For example, if we want to merge faq, faq should have a procedure to change the owner of all the faqs.

1.2. Dynamic Queries: In this solution we avoid to write service contracts and their implementations but we need to use the pg_* system tables, for example : pg_contraint, pg_class, pg_attribute. The aim here is to look for all the childs (foreign keys) that acs_objects.object_id has, get the column and table name from pg_* tables and make the query to update each row.

2. Merge the memberships:
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Where does the duplicad account belong to? Which groups?. Here we need to change the relationships/memberships, adding the good account to the groups that the duplicated account belongs to, then delete the relations between the duplicated account and its groups.

3. Delete the duplicated account:
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This could be an update of the user_state setting it to the state 'deleted' or doing a really 'nuke' of the account, deleting each row of each table that has relation with the bad account.

Please, if you have questions or sugestions, I would appreciate them :).

Regards,
Enrique.

Thanks for your comments Andrew.

You are right!, the acs_rels and the acs_objects would be merged at a global level with an "update..." .

I forgot to post that I uploaded more details about it, You can check it out in https://openacs.org/storage/view/proposals/user-account-merge-um/index_draft_version.html. In that document I wrote and example only with faqs, that's the reason I putted the join with faq table, however, when we will implement in general, we have to do it globally as you said.

With regard to that you said that every package need special action and some pages may have special user interfaces for human-assited merging:

1. The special action per each package would be needed because exist packages like "forums" that has tables with columns that reference the account to remove, for example: the table forums_messages has a column named 'user_id' that references users(user_id). In this case we have to solutions explained in the link I wrote above.

2. The aim is to use the same user interface to merge all the things you need to. I mean that we will not need special user interfaces for human-assisted mergin.

I hope that information can be useful for you and thanks for for thoughts.

If you have more suggestions or questions, please don't hesitate to ask :).

Enrique.

Small input from user perspective. In my experience I had quite a lot of cases where I needed to merge accounts (of course I've done it manually).
One of things that often pop-ups and I don't see it covered in current proposal document is handling different permissions for the same object that user has relationship with.
Real-life example: Joe the User with account A is simple member (student) of group/community XYZ, same Joe the User with account B is administrator (professor) of the same group/community XYZ.
How system would handle such case? I guess, it should stick to relationship wich has higher permission lever (in exampe case that would be administrator). Would that fit to all situations?