Automatic changes show up with wrong user in history

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#1

Hi.

I just tried the URL Normalizer Extension and noticed that the new versions of the pages are attributed to the user that made the latest change before. So when userA updated the page to version 10.1 two weeks ago, the history now shows version 11.1 “Normalize links” with the editor userA, but userA didn’t do anything to the page.
URL Normalizer is just an example here, I’m quite sure it’s not the problem. I noticed that attribution error in my xwiki a few weeks ago but had no time to care about it. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what plugin/job/whatever triggered that error a few weeks ago.

Does anyone know if this is intended behaviour, or a bug?

#2

The way it works is the following:

  • When a page is modified and saved the URL Normalizer checks the content to normalize URLs into wiki links. Thus the page is saved with the current user.

If a plugin/job/whatever did a save on the page and reused the last author then it’s potentially a problem with that plugin/job/whatever. But it could also be normal.

Note that scheduler jobs are executed with a user you specify (or the user who created the job page), see Scheduler Application (XWiki.org)

Another possibility is that somewhere in your wiki you’re using the URL Normalizer script service and calling it to normalize some documents. In this case, the last author is used ATM (and that’s probably a bug that would need to be reported ;)).

So you need to find who’s saving the pages.

#3

Thank you for the explanation. So this is normal for URL Normalizer script service (which is exactly where I noticed this) and as soon as I find the time for it, I’m going to report this as a bug.

#4

I found what was triggering that behavior a few weeks ago: Moving/Renaming.
Moving/Renaming a page reuses the last author, which is quite confusing. Renaming the backlinks uses the author that moved the page.