Username is not working out, can I use another field?

Klips · Post by **Klips** » 29 Mar 2006, 05:01

Within my company, we use LDAP. It is working great for us. But in IT's wisdom, they have us all using an alphanumeric 6-character login ID. This makes it very difficult for us to easily identify who is actually doing and reporting what.

So, is there a way to get use the us to see the User's full name used instead of this 6 character loginID?

Right now we get emails with new posting and etc. with this instead of a name. Example: loginID is vz4nrx, realname is Steve Smith.

Any suggestions? I hate to modify code and then have to redo it six months from now when a new update of MANTIS comes out. :wink:

Thanks

dcomo · Post by **dcomo** » 29 Mar 2006, 05:35

I have actually done this, however just as you said- It's a hack.
I could provide you the files, however when the next version comes out, you'd have to diff my files against the new build of Mantis.

Let me see if I can hack some functionality into Mantis and provide it to Victor for the next release. (However, I don't know exactly when that will be.)

Klips · Post by **Klips** » 29 Mar 2006, 12:38

This would be great....

I think that the main complaint from the team is the email notices that I have sending out for new posts and etc. have our obscure login IDs.

If I can just make the emails show or include the user's full name in it, this alone would even be a be help.

dcomo · Post by **dcomo** » 29 Mar 2006, 13:24

I'm actually a network admin myself of a company that you may know really well, and would never think about using such obscure login ID's. However, I'm really dying to know the reason behind it....

Do you know why users are set up in such a fashion?

Klips · Post by **Klips** » 29 Mar 2006, 13:46

They been doing this for years. I was hired back in 1988 when VAX and other mainframes where mainstream. So I believe I can tell you what I believe general idea was at the time and it has stuck. I don't know if they where to do it all over again from scratch, if it would be the same. But it has been around for a very long time.

I work in a corporation of 200k+ employees. Before we where split off of the mothership (sort of speak) this number was significantly higher yet. This means there are very high probabilities of people having the exact same name.

I happen to have a name that appears to repeat quite often. Just in the my facility where I am located there are at least six people with my first and last name. At least two or three of us have the same middle initial. (Go figure!)

So they decided instead of trying to come up with derivitives of everyone's names to make them unique, they came up with this 6 character alphanumeric schema. They pull these unique IDs from some system that they setup, so every user his own distinction (kind of like the borg, 11,234 of 198,765).

It also gives their security people a semi... Not only do they make it hard to find out someone's password, but you can't guess at what someone's login ID is. Of course over time and if you know where to go look for the information within the system, you can lookup someone's login ID. Your just not going to find it out unless you already have an account on the systems.

I think this covers your question... :lol:

Of course this is the short version of the story... :wink:

Klips · Post by **Klips** » 29 Mar 2006, 21:49

As a temporary stop-gap, I modified the email_api.php file. Particularly, I modified the function email_build_visible_bug_data. I did this so that at least the emails that are generated and sent out have the reporter and the assigned persons fullname displayed. This doesn't solve everything for us, but it is a start.

if ( access_compare_level( $t_user_access_level, config_get( 'view_handler_threshold' ) ) ) {
if ( 0 != $row['handler_id'] ) {
$t_bug_data['email_handler'] = user_get_realname( $row['handler_id'] )." (".user_get_name( $row['handler_id'] ).")";
} else {
$t_bug_data['email_handler'] = '';
}
}

# $t_bug_data['email_reporter'] = user_get_name( $row['reporter_id'] );
$t_bug_data['email_reporter'] = user_get_realname( $row['reporter_id'] )." (".user_get_name( $row['reporter_id'] ).")";

As you can see from the two bolded lines, I have managed to get the sent emails to show the fullname and the loginID.

I most likely won't do any more of this than I have to because I don't want to have to come back around and do it again when MANTIS is updated.

Is this something that we should put in as a feature request? I saw the link to the bug tracker for the bug tracker somewhere, but I can't seem to find it now. :lol: