[Patch] Populate username fields using session info

[Ryan J Ollos]

When a user has a valid session (created by entering name and email in the preferences panel), the ticket's reporter field is populated with the user's name and email in the format: name <email>.

It would be nice if the same functionality existed for populating the blog post's Post Author field, and the blog comment's Your email or username: field. The latter is probably of more practical use because anonymous comments are probably commonly allowed, but I imagine a blog post typically requires an account.

That might bring up another feature to implement (assuming this can't be done already) ... an option to only allow comments when a user has a valid session key. This is done, for example, with the VotePlugin.

[olaf.meeuwissen@…]

+1

We're using account info from our Active Directory (AD) server and the account names (sids in the session table) are pretty unintelligible: two letters and a bunch of digits. So there's no telling who AC1234567 really is unless you've memorized all 400 of them ;-)

We do have the AD display names in the name field of the session attribute table so if those could be displayed that would go a long way to figuring out who AC1234567 actually is.

[olaf.meeuwissen@…]

A colleague and me hacked up a patch that does this. Works fine for us.

[olaf.meeuwissen@…]

Sorry, I had to zip the patch​ to work around the spam prevention measures. They don't like HTML ... :-(

[anonymous]

Eh, there's a little issue still. The author name is not used when creating a new post and previewing a new post or comment.

[osimons]

Thanks for the patch. It is somewhat more elaborate than what I had expected... I had just imagined a small lookup at the template level, with minor changes going from this:

req.authname

to

req.session.get('name') or req.authname

It should be no more than a few instances of this in the fullblog_edit.html template, and then whatever is entered there stays with the post anyway - regardless of where it is initially fetched.

[osimons]

(And same treatment to the relevant part in fullblog_view.html where adding comments of course).

So the patch would just look like this to make it somewhat similar to the treatment of usernames in Ticket system:

0.11/tracfullblog/templates/fullblog_edit.html

@@ -92 +92 @@
                 <label for="blog-author">Post Author:</label><br />
                 <input id="blog-author" type="text" 
                       name="author" size="40"
-                      value="${defined('blog_edit') and blog_edit.author or req.authname}" />
+                      value="${(defined('blog_edit') and blog_edit.author)
+                               or (req.session.get('name') or req.authname)}" />
               </div>
               <div class="field">
                 <label for="blog-categories">Categories (space separated):</label><br />

0.11/tracfullblog/templates/fullblog_view.html

@@ -113 +113 @@
                       <br />
                       <input id="author" type="text" 
                           name="author" size="30"
-                          value="${defined('blog_comment') and blog_comment.author or req.authname}" />
+                          value="${(defined('blog_comment') and blog_comment.author)
+                                   or (req.session.get('name') or req.authname)}" />
                   </div>
                 </py:if>
                 <div class="buttons">

For commenting, I could even consider dropping the check for anonymous so that the comment author field is always displayed. Then the same logic would be used and made visible to the author - and even allowing changing if so desired.

Then I may even consider this logic for name suggestion:

req.session.get('name') or req.session.get('email') or req.authname

[olaf.meeuwissen@…]

Blame the size of the changes on our sorely missing Trac knowledge.

Would your suggestion also work for existing posts and comments? Ours does, BTW. FWIW, ours also lets people retro-actively change their "real" name ;-)

[osimons]

No, like all the other modules in Trac it will not link to some user dimension that in effect can change history. What is entered stays as-is for posts and comments - just like they do in wiki and ticket and other modules/plugins in Trac.

So, I won't be adding a user dimension - at least as long as no such dimension & API exists in Trac itself.

[olaf.meeuwissen@…]

OK, I see but I've also come to realize that what we wanted is subtly different from the original #description. We want to use the FullBlogPlugin for a low-barrier blog site in a medium sized company (about 400 people). User account data (account name, display name and email address) come from an Active Directory server and cannot be modified by the user. Posts and comments require the user to be authenticated.

In this setup, entering any of the author info is unnecessary. We have even disabled the input field for that, IIRC. We want to submit the blog posts by account name (req.authname) to avoid the possibility of attributing posts to the wrong person in the not that unlikely case we have people with the same display name.

In that situation, you end up with a patch like the one we attached because it only changes the MVC View part. Your suggested changes would modify the MVC Controller part and would leave one guessing at the interpretation of when ended up in the database). Depending on one's goal, either approach has its pros and cons, I guess.

[osimons]

In 14773:

FullBlogPlugin: For author, default to username instead of login if name is defined. Closes #7594.

[Ryan J Ollos]

There are some issues with r14773:

• For an authenticated user, before the change the authname was stored in the author column, now the user fullname is stored in the author column of the database. This makes posts before/after the change be associated with different authors. The version_author before and after the change is the authname.
• For an authenticated user with a fullname set in preferences, the add comment form uses the authname, which is probably preferable, but inconsistent with the create/edit post form after r14773.

Trac consistently stores the authname in the database rather than the fullname. It will probably be better to follow that pattern.

In Trac we use Chrome.authorinfo to render an author, and a fullname will be shown when [trac] show_full_names is true for Trac 1.2+. This could be used in the dl.metainfo to render the author's fullname. It could use used anywhere an author name is rendered.

​Chrome.authorinfo is available in Trac 0.12 and later.

[Ryan J Ollos]

In 16824:

TracFullBlogPlugin 0.1.6.3: Store authname in database

The fullname (Trac 1.0+) and user datetime preferences
(Trac 1.2+) will be rendered. Anonymous users will have
a username comprised of their session name and email.

Fixes #12630, Refs #7594.