Web Sign On retrieving a user's name

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1. A guest user

   #1 14:55, Mon 19 Apr 2010

   Hi Nick, Here’s an SSO question: A user has queried the name displayed in the MRM app, returned from Web Sign-on. From a Uni ID, I get the name like this: > User user = userLookup.getUserByWarwickUniId(uniId); > > approver.setUniId(uniId); approver.setName(user.getFullName()); approver.setDepartment(user.getDepartment()); approver.setUserType(user.getUserType()); This seems to return the name attached to the alphabetically first user code associated with that Uni ID – so for instance for Robin Ball (9871566), the name is displayed as “Physics Guest”. (Paul Chimicz’ gizmo shows 4 user codes for him under the SSO tab – https://andissoap.warwick.ac.uk/membership-interface/member/selectmember ) The question is – is there a way that SSO can be somehow clever and identify the primary usercode and return the name associated with that? Zoe
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2. A guest user

   #2 15:42, Mon 19 Apr 2010

   Re: retrieving a user's name

   Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do here, because of the lack of data in NDS (which is where WSOS goes to look up Warwick users). NDS doesn’t have a concept of a “primary” usercode. WSOS’s approach to finding the user code associated with a particular uni ID is to find all user objects with that uni ID, which are not login-disabled, and which have a non-null email address. At this point we have no further means of distinguishing the objects, so we just pick the first one. In theory, we could query Membership or ADS for this data, but unfortunately those systems don’t have a high enough uptime to meet WSOS’s service levels. Active Directory has (I believe) a one-to-one mapping between membership users and directory objects, but isn’t intended to be used by web applications. It may be that the Account Management project will sort this out for us, since they intend to do away with having multiple user objects in the directory with the same uni ID. Until then, though, (or until someone can get a “primary” flag into NDS) there aren’t really many options, other than modifying the “guest” directory entries so that they don’t have the same uni. ID. HTH Chris
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