Can not delete a user

[konsultex]

I am running Alfresco 2.9.0 (B 683) schema 116 on Windows 2003 R2 X64 with MySql 5.0.51b on the same server. Java is 1.6.0 for 64 bits.

After another person added about 60 users I was told that there was a problem with two of them. Since the users were defined over a period of several days I am not sure exactly what happened. The person created another user for the ones with the problem. I suspect either some problem with MySql at some point during work with that user or the possibility of the person having used the "back" button in the browser to navigate to a previous page and do things over again.

One of the problem users has a strange user name. The other one does not have a home space.

When I search for the user (navarro) I get two of them. One with a strange name like this "navarro0bb1f5d7-55d5-11dd-9e5d-fd03a0685fe4" and the other one normal. I can not delete any of those 2 users. What I get in the web client is:

Unable to delete the User object associated with the Person. This is not an error if an external authentication mechanism such as NTLM was previously active.

Since I am not using NTLM or other external mechanism this message shows a problem. In this case the log does not show anything (I may need to enable something in log4j.properties but I'm not sure what).

I noticed this problem when trying to invite users to spaces. When I try to find all the candidates I get this:

A system error happened during the operation: Node does not exist: workspace://SpacesStore/21f6438e-51e9-11dd-8aca-e505e54c21ae

I would really like to get rid of these users because I am afraid of going into production with a corrupt database. I saw just a few references to the error message in the forum so this must not be a common problem but I did not see any solution there. Does anybody know how I can get rid of these users through Alfresco, MySql, Web Script, etc?

Thanks.

[konsultex]

Does anybody have ideas for deleting these users?

[samuel_penn]

No idea if this helps at all, but I was recently having a similar issue (on an Alfresco 2.2 system where NTLM has never been used). Trying to delete a user gave the following error:

Unable to delete the User object associated with the Person. 
This is not an error if an external authentication mechanism such as NTLM was previously active.
Failed to delete User due to error: 
could not delete: [org.alfresco.repo.domain.hibernate.DbAuthorityImpl#9]; nested exception is 
org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: 
could not delete: [org.alfresco.repo.domain.hibernate.DbAuthorityImpl#9]
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

In the alfresco.log, there were database (MySQL) constraint errors listed. No duplicate users as far as I could tell, but deleting the user always failed with the same errors. Since the user had a user home of "/Company Home", I tried creating another space, giving the user permission to that and updating the user to use this new space as their home. Attempting to delete the user after doing this still gave an error:

Unable to delete the User object associated with the Person. 
This is not an error if an external authentication mechanism such as NTLM was previously active.
‍‍‍‍

However, the user was actually deleted this time. Not sure whether this helps or not, but there does seem to be some issues in this area.

Sam.

[konsultex]

Gentlemen,

Unfortunately I had to go into production with this database and so far nothing helped. Even though the repository is working fine (so far…. knock on wood) I have occasional errors when creating or accessing users, not just these examples. This does not really worry me but I am concerned that this situation could cause a repository corruption problem. I read posts about people having great problems in recovering their repositories.

I wonder if anybody at Alfresco has an idea of what's going on and how to get rid of the bad users. Or if anybody was successful in doing this.

[regainfo]

I also got trying to delete a user with no Home Space on Alfresco Labs3 :
Unable to delete the User object associated with the Person. This is not an error if an external authentication mechanism such as NTLM was previously active.
I think that the create of user did not work properly so the user cannot be deleted

[umass89]

I had similar issues as in this thread and deleting unwanted users. I resolved the issue by running the following javascript snippet:

var badUser = people.getPerson("testID") ;
badUser.remove();

[chicks]

I don't recommend using the script above, as it will leave null users in any groups to which the user was a member, and none of the group's users will be visible.

This is still an issue in labs 3.0Final.  There are several open issues in jira, and several posts in these forums, to which Alfresco engineers have given vague responses, but have obviously never actually tested or encountered the issue.

It's a real issue, which results in a user list with long-gone users who cannot be removed.  Some real attention to the issue would be appreciated!

[josw]

As i used NTLM for Testing without getting die Admin users working, i have the same orphaned users in my system.
There must be a way to delete certain user info or even reset all of them.
That's a real Issue here and a short info would be lovely.

[dbr9449]

We had a problem with duplicates on two userids.  Now when we try to delete the userid, we get an error message that the user cannot be deleted because it does not exist. 

We looked but were unable to find where Alfresco stores the userids.  Does anyone know where that would be?

At this point, using the show all button on the manage system users screen results in an error message ending with:
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Non-unique path: found : /app:company_home/app:user_homes 0

Does anyone know how to delete the non-existing users or bring back the show all users button? 

Thanks.

[stevewickii]

The users are in a different store: user://alfrescoUserStore

Log into the Alfresco web client as "admin", and open the Node Browser in the Administration Console.

The users are located under /sys:system/syseople.