SID-01037: Use of WikiName or account name in METADATA

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	4.3.2	Perl version:	5.8
Category:	CategoryAuthentication	Server OS:	RH	Last update:	15 years ago

For a given topic the authors name is stored in the METADATA like

 %META:TOPICINFO{author=...

The format of the name is currently the account name, although it must have been the WikiName at some time.

What controls this ? I would like to use the WikiName and not the account name

-- PeterJones - 2010-11-25

Discussion and Answer

TWiki now has three types of names for a user:

• WikiName - this is the displayed name
• Login name - this is the name the user uses to login
• CUID - canonical user ID - use as author when saving content, also cached in meta data

The CUID was introduced in TWiki 4. Personally I think this was over-engineered, e.g. is not necessary. I think the reason to introduce the CUID was that the login name cannot always be used by the underlying storage system. For example, RCS cannot handle user names that start with a digit or have special chars such as @ signs.

For the default TWikiUserMapping manager & HtPasswdUser password manager, all three types are identical. It is up to other user mapping & password managers to define what the CUID is. You can design managers that generate a CUID that is identical to the WikiName; in which case RCS and %META:TOPICINFO{}% uses the WikiName as you want.

IMHO, a logical way is to always use the WikiName as the author ID. This would require a redesign of the user management of TWiki. Feel free to propose and drive this change. It needs to be done in a compatible way though.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-11-25

On the other hand, why do you need to store the WikiName? There are ways to map between the three types of user names.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-11-25

We need to use something that doesnt change. The account name is an email address and if this changes then the author does not get mapped to the WikiName. Would this need a major software change or a config change ?

-- PeterJones - 2010-11-26

This looks like a bigger change.

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-01-04

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