Unable to edit Syntaxes because someone else edited it without permissions?

Help / Discuss
1

I’m trying to access the available Syntaxes in the Admin Menu, however I’m getting the following error message:

This configuration cannot be displayed because it was last edited by [[XWiki.pnasdalac]] who doesn’t have permission to edit this page.

Just restarted XWiki, also updated to the latest version 18.3.0, still the same result. I have so many questions, starting with …

  1. How can that even happen (only scenario I could come with is the second point, but…)?
  2. Even if that user had permissions before and now doesn’t have them anymore, how is it a good idea to prevent the page being rendered for other administrators?
  3. How to fix it? :smiley:

Edit: found an answer to 3 - temporarily giving admin permissions to the mentioned user allows ME to access the page again. So that’s a workaround, but seems like something that should be fixed.

Thanks!

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2

I’m not sure how it could have happened but the solution is to edit the Rendering.RenderingConfig page with a user with proper permissions and save it, to give back the permissions needed to that page.

3

Hey @vmassol , thanks for your answer! To be more specific - my user account has proper permissions, but I could not open the page. It showed the error message despite me having all permissions.

Once I made the other user (pnasdalac) admin, then I could edit the page again (without logout/login or any other change of my account). Independently on how that could have happened, this behavior seems very wrong to me.

4

The error is because the document that contains the code for this configuration lost its rights. The rights of the code are the rights of its author. And the rights that are necessary to display a configuration section are edit rights on the document where the configuration will be stored. I think this isn’t wrong, but it is indeed very hard to understand when you see this error message.

The problem you encountered might be that the user who installed the extension/the wiki lost wiki admin right. A possible solution for this would be to implement XWIKI-13974.

5

Hi Michael,

thanks for taking the time to respond!

Immediately when reading this, I was thinking - what happens if a user leaves the organization? Changes department and thus should no longer have elevated permissions? That’s essentially what the issue you linked is describing.

To be honest, the concept of fundamental parts of the Wiki (such as setting documents) being linked to individual users seems weird at first glance (but I do not have a lot of experience with the internals of XWiki to be fair). At the very least its quite hard to understand, I would have never expected that without getting your explanation here.

Personally, I believe the suggestion explained by the issue (and the linked ones) would be a better approach. If there are no plans to change it (indicated by the issue approaching 10y of age), at least a more explanatory error message might be an idea?

Again, thanks for your time and explanation!