29 September 2009, 3:46

Hi Nigel and Richard,

Under http://mahara.org/node/352 I found a discussion on what happens when you want to delete a user in Mahara. As the discussion is from last year and you allude to changes in version 1.1 / 1.2, I was wondering what you have already implemented and what is foreseen for version 1.2 in terms of deleting a user and his data.

We have not been using Mahara for long, but our first students left our study program in the summer. I am particularly interested in knowing what happens to users that were not created locally, but who are linked to Moodle via LDAP. What happens when their accounts are deleted in Moodle? Will they be deleted from Mahara immediately as well (I would assume that to be the case)?

If I wanted to keep these users in Mahara, e.g. if we provided our alumni with portfolio space, could I transfer them to a local account without having to export and import their portfolio?

Kristina

29 September 2009, 21:19

Hi Kristina,

We implemented the changes at the code level that were required. Now when a user is deleted, most of their data is too (just enough is kept around so we can display forum posts and other such things correctly).

When accounts are deleted in moodle, that does not transfer to Mahara. They're two separate systems in that regard. There might be a use case for linking them up though, you might have one for example 

So regarding your last question, deleting their account in the Moodle would leave their account on the Mahara - you would just have to switch their authentication method from being XMLRPC to Internal, which I believe triggers an automatic "please set your password" email to them. 

30 September 2009, 7:31

Hello Nigel,

Thanks for the information on deleting accounts. Thus, even when the authentication method XMLRPC is in place and the student's Mahara profile is linked to their Moodle profile, their accounts on Mahara are not immediately deleted? That would be good in case I forget to switch them over to internal before their Moodle accounts expire.

Is there a faster way of switching multiple users from the exernal to the internal authentication method without having to dig into the (MySQL) database (to which I don't have access)? We would have to switch approx. 120 students each year if we wanted to keep their portfolios available.

Kristina

30 September 2009, 18:43

Yes, that is correct - deletion is entirely separate.

You can switch the users individually, on the user edit page for each one. There is a dropdown to choose what authentication instance they use. If you want to do it on a mass basis, for now unfortunately the only option is to write a query for the database - although the query is not too hard to generate and we could help you with that  

01 October 2009, 2:49

Thank you, Nigel. Currently, we still need to decide what to do with the former students. If we decide for either deletion or transfer to local accounts and can't come up with the necessary queries, I'll shout in the WR.

Kristina