Too much for a novice like me to grasp and run with it alone... If I understand correctly, your proposed method would create an option in the $userclass and set it to the employee's ID. I would then need to create a statement to check if that value exists for any other $user prior to new user creation. Sounds good. I just don't have the peices. Would I then also have to modify Specials:Renameuser to replace the $user(uniqueSSOID)optional value during rename?

While scavaging in user.php, I found a query snippet that checks if a user with the given name exists, then returns the ID.

function idForName() { $fname = 'User::idForName'; $gotid = 0; $s = trim( $this->getName() ); if ( 0 == strcmp( '', $s ) ) return 0; $dbr =& wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE ); $id = $dbr->selectField( 'user', 'user_id', array( 'user_name' => $s ), $fname ); if ( $id === false ) { $id = 0; } return $id; }

How could the above be copied/modified to return the full username ($username) that contains the string ($UniqueSSOid) of the about-to-be created user? I''m not a developer, but if I get help with the above, I can figure out how to alter the Autologin script to: 1) halt auto new user creation and display a html informative message/page to the browser. 2) send wgEmergencyContact email with existing and proposed usernames.

As for actually renaming the user: If I get this far, I would be very happy to perform the Special:Renameuser process manually... ... Until I learn more php

Thx again, Brian

This thread is also related to: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2006-May/011779.html

On 5/4/06, Lane, Ryan laner@navo.navy.mil wrote:

...

Now if I can just create a method to determin if the user exists prior

to

...

new user creation - detailed in: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2006-May/011779.html Thanks again, Brian

You could add the user's ID as a user option on user creation:

   $user->setOption('uniqueSSOID',$yourUniqueSSOID);

in function initUser() in the authentication plugin you are using. If you do that, you can search the database based upon the ID.

I'm not sure if the core code currently has any hooks that would allow you to rename the user when the user logs in, without reporting errors...

I'm glad you brought this up, because I really didn't think about this, and this is definitely something I'll run into in the future. I'll have to look into adding support for this in my plugin.

V/r, Ryan Lane Lane@Wikimedia.org