Can't delete user

[simon]

Hi again,

I created a user with a typo in his account name… because I couldn't change this name (seems that the username is used as a key or so) I tried to remove the user.

For some reason this didn't work as expected. Didn't get any error message but the user was still visible in the group I assigned him to. After removing this user manually from the group I could still see this user in the userlist. I deleted the home space of this user as well (I did this manually, don't know if these cleaning operations could be done by Alfresco). Trying to remove this user from the userlist a second time without luck:

Failed to delete User due to error: User does not exist: actvityleader_litho‍

Note: The user is still visible in the userlist…

I removed users before and that did work fine. I stopped / restarted Alfresco, had a look in the database and removed the reference in the "recipient" table.

In this recipient table I did find a reference to a user I removed a long time ago as well but then again I don't know where this recipient table is used for.

[andy]

Hi Simon

The username is used as a key.

At the moment when you delete a user all permissions for that user should be tidied up. Removing deleted users from groups is an outstanding bug that will be fixed in the next release.

The recipient table is just a list of all recipients, an entry here does not matter. An entry in the node_perm_entry.recipient would be an issue, these should be deleted.

Can you tell me:
* which authentication service you are using;
* and how you are adding people and users.

I will then try and reproduce this.

Deleting a user means deleting the user and the person.
The user list is in fact generated from a list of all the people.
It sounds like the user has been deleted the first time and not the person or there were multiple people linked to the same user name, one was deleted, which deleted the user and you now have a dangling person.
The first is unlikely the second possible if you are bulk loading poeple.

Regards

Andy

[simon]

Thanks Andy!

Good to know that the "deleted user still in group" thing is a bug so it has nothing to do with my problem.

The authentication service used here is somewhat more complicated. We use the normal webbased authentication at the moment but we tested NTLM as well. NTLM is disabled at the moment but don't know if this could be a problem (does NTLM add user names?).

Didn't add a lot of users yet so all the new users were added manually, no bulk uploads or so. Same thing for the user mentioned here (actvityleader_litho), I added this user manually. This as a dummy user and doesn't exist in some other database (like Active Directory) so this is an Alfresco local user only.

I looked for an entry in the node_perm_entry.recipient but the actvityleader_litho user (my ghost user) isn't in there.

The user list is in fact generated from a list of all the people.

So where can I find the list of all the people, should be somewhere in the database, no?

What's the difference between a user name and a person? I get the user name thing but what's this person concept?

[andy]

Hi Simon

Username is used as the key to map to any authentication system.
This is then used to find a person in our repository which represents this user.

Person knows nothing about authentication.
We have a User type to store user information in alfresco - in a separate store.

NTLM will auto create people entries on demand as users log in, by default. NTLM holds the authentication information - so there will be no matching user in Alfresco: but there will be a matching person.

I will try and recreate your issue.

Regards

Andy