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Name Changes - Advice


Kelvin

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I am looking for some advice

One of our members of staff has recent got married and so I need to change her Surname. Is there anyway to change the username as I am keen to keep the users stats and existing calls.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Hi @Kelvin ,

From my understanding, the username is a fixed field and cannot be changed as the user could be linked to lots of different tables in Hornbill (Assets, Requests, Boards, Co-Workers, Workspaces, Documentation to name a few). Just changing the username will likely break the links between all of these tables so I believe this is part of the reason why username fields shouldn't be changed.

Where I work, in Active Directory, when someone has gotten Married their username stays the same, but only their Surname changes. This is then reflected back into Hornbill by LDAP_Import. However if we didn't have the LDAP_Import we would still keep the username the same, whilst the surname has changed.

Your internal processes may differ, but this is ours and is why it is important the everyone stay attached to the same username indefinitely... and why usernames must remain unique. (Usernames are shared with multiple applications as well which is another important factor)

Maybe someone from Hornbill can offer you more insight.

Thanks,

Samuel

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@samwoo thank you for your experience. 

Unfortunately when a user has a name change here we systematically change their username on each of our systems. This would then cause us issues as Hornbill would be the only account that would still have the old username.

Hopefully someone at Hornbill will be able to offer a workaround.

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@Kelvin @JoanneG @samwoo

A user username or user ID needs to be something that does not change. The reason is that this ID is used to build and maintain relational data within the entire system. I hope you can imagine that changing this will break the referential integrity of your data (Sam also explained this in his reply). Simply put, if you know there is a possibility that the user ID you want to use could change (such as a surname) then don't use it. 

The only advice can offer is that you need to review your username policy and make sure that going forward you will ensure the uniqueness of the username. I want to underline that this is not something specific to Hornbill but to any IT system or relational data where relations are made based on IDs. In order for this relationship to work and be maintained these IDs will always have to be unique and suffer no changes as long as the data exist and is used in data relations.

To also answer the query about changing this the simple answer is no. I'm afraid a username cannot be changed in Hornbill. Based on the above there should never be a need for changing this but if you do find yourself in this situation the only option is to archive the existing user and create a new one using the new username.

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@victor

Thank you for your response.

I understand the unique ID and that is fine we will have to find an alternative way for Hornbill users however we change the User ID on every one of our systems when a user has a name change, the old usernames are never reused.

We are about to set up Single Sign On with AD Connect and it would interesting to see what happens when the AD account changes.

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29 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

We are about to set up Single Sign On with AD Connect and it would interesting to see what happens when the AD account changes.

@Kelvin - as long as you map the Name ID to some AD parameter/attribute which is unique and does not change then all is good... for example, you could have an attribute in AD called "user_id" which will be something unique for each user ... 

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