Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to usernabme instead of emails for login

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Posted by defunct defunct on
We've had a similar problem with this pertaining to mobile numbers.

Most of what we deploy are systems where the mobile phone number is the primary identifier....

We've used a couple of methods to circumnavigate this including such cheesy tricks as:

-Creating dummy email addresses such as +mailto:4478189938@system.com
Which is neat enough for systems where email isn't really required at all. Its fairly straightforward to alter the interfaces etc.. so they assume when a number comes in it is actually <number>@<email>

-Inheriting the user objects to create a new mobile_user... If a user doesn't want an email we assume a similar dummy name creation, and hen create our own mobile_user_login type funtions that the pass through to the underlying registration functions...

If you've essentially 'inherited' the existing tables as per the acs method then you don't disrupt the underlying operations.. all you need do is add you specific indetifier processing on top...

My understanding was from aD 4.2 that this was the intended way to use the toolkit and the purpose of the entire acs_objects approach...

But, is there a case for a more fundemental change to the core to support different identifier types?

Of course the issues arises that mobile numbers and emails are globally unique. Screen names are not... you end up having to implement one of those awful

'The name you chose has been taken... what about Blob99784?'

Yuk ;o)