Change the username

Help / Discuss
1

Is it somehow possible to change the username?

Would it be possible to change the username by changing the XWiki/username page?

2

Hi, the username is the id so if you change the username you change the id. You can do that by renaming the user profile page indeed.

3

Note that you’ll have a new user. The old one won’t exist anymore. So any change the old user made won’t have been done by the new user (page histories are not rewritten). Also if the old user had script rights or PR and it’s renamed then I guess these pages will stop working to. You might need to run some extension to fix that.

What you can change without impact is the first name and last name.

4

See https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Change%20Content%20Author

@committers: I think we have a usability issue here and somehow we should protect the user from making a mistake and automatically change documents author to the new user. Unless we do that already and I missed it! Opinions? thx

5

This means, if the user A created the page P and the username is later on changed to B, the page P does still show the username of A?

6

ping!?

7

Did you try it? that’s the easy way to check it.

8

We have a refactoring API to replace the document author but ATM, AFAIK, we use it only when deleting a user, if the admin chooses to “replace” the deleted user (i.e. to update the pages that were last modified by the deleted user).

It makes sense to update the existing documents when renaming an user. The question is whether we update only the last version (last author) or all the versions.

9

Thanks @mflorea . I’ve found an existing jira issue that seems to be about this: Loading... (from 2007 :)).

10

Hi all, Just wondering if this feature has a roadmap. We’d love this feature to

  1. change a username and the id for the backend (and docs stays the same)

or

  1. change a username (and id) and the documents all “migrate” to the new id?

Thanks, J

11

Hi, this is not easy to do (you need to go over the full history of all modifications done by the past user for example). However we have something that is close to this (I think it doesn’t go over the history): https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Change%20Content%20Author

Note that I think that we’ve recently implemented this inside XWiki when you delete an author. It then asks you if you want to replace that author. I’m trying to find where this is documented, see You're invited to talk on Matrix

12

Now documented at https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Administration%20Application#HUsers

13

@vmassol hello!

Am I right there is no way to change the user ID for now?

We have got a trouble, we have invited the users via invitations, and most of them ignored our guideline to use username like xwiki_vincent for example. I would like to change their usernames, but I haven’t found any button.

Am I right the only way is to delete the user and make a new one for them manually?

Thank you!

14

AFAIK you can simply rename the user pages (there used to be some problems but it should work fine now, see Loading... ).

15

Here, right?
image

I am feeling this is not a right one, because I need to change the userid, we don’t care about the name shown in the profile.

16

No, this is the title! :slight_smile: See https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/UserGuide/Features/DocumentLifecycle/#HMove2FRename

17

Well, it looks like I did something wrong I changed the christoph_unterkofler

image
image

Page was renamed, but I haven’t got the user in the user list, and this Christian is still present but without of the profile.

18

Or is it right?
image

Vincent, sorry just in case :slight_smile: