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Display Real Names instead of Usernames

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URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=27018
Printed Date: 02 April 2026 at 7:08pm
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Topic: Display Real Names instead of Usernames
Posted By: TWilson
Subject: Display Real Names instead of Usernames
Date Posted: 20 February 2009 at 10:26pm

OVERVIEW:

We use NAM - Novell Access Manager (formerly Novell iChain) to authenticate users on our corporate intranet.

 

The domain names for our intranet web sites are pointing to NAM gateways (multiple with load balancing).  When a user opens their browser and requests access to an intranet resource, a session is established with the NAM gateways.

 

The gateways authenticate the user’s credentials (username & password) against our PeopleSoft eDirectory.   If authenticated, NAM adds the users PeopleSoft eDirectory info to http request header then the gateways forward the request (proxy) to the appropriate web server establishing a session on behalf of the user.

 

The web servers are configured to only respond to requests received from the NAM gateway IP addresses.  Requests received from any other IPs are ignored.

 

Web developers access the employee info by requesting the server variables containing it.  For security reasons, NAM replaces the users password stored in the B64 encoded AUTH_HEAD with the users username (ie AUTH_HEAD contains the username twice instead of username and password).

 

In our lab, we've been able to successfully use the member_api to log our users into the forum. 

 

ISSUE:

 

For security reasons we prohibit the display of usernames.

 

As such we would like to display the users Real_name in place of their username any where that is shown in the forum.  

 

Is there a list of variables that can be changed to accomplish this?

 

Regards,

 

Tom Wilson 



Replies:
Posted By: Scotty32
Date Posted: 21 February 2009 at 11:58am
It could be done, but would be a very difficult task, as you would need to go through the entire forums files changing it.

All you would do though, for example, on the forum posts page is change the SQL statements to call the "Real_Name" field instead of the "Username" field in the "tblAuthor" table.


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Posted By: TWilson
Date Posted: 21 February 2009 at 6:39pm

I got it done.  It wasn't too bad.  I had to modify the SQL in several places (changes the data stored in the arrays), modify 1 variable and make a few minor edits elsewhere. 

 

Once I clean-up my documentation, I post the changes that I made.

 

I would like to request that a future version include a screenname record.  The program should be written to show/display the screenname record instead of the username record. 

 

User  registration could then be written to allow the same or different names to be used in both fields.  Using the same name in both fields would replicate what is seen today.  Using different names would provide increase security by preventing other users from data mining user  login names.

 

 

On another note, I've also found a bug related to the member_API that I needed to fix.  If the user was logged in using the member API, and then clicked the link at the bottom of the page to remove the cookies, they couldn't re-login until after they had closed their browser.  Removing the cookies logged them out but it didn't clear the session("forumuser") variable. 

 

Regards,

 

Tom Wilson

Posted By: mfranz
Date Posted: 28 April 2009 at 2:25pm
This is something I would like to do in my installation as well. Did you ever get a chance to update your deployment to get this to work? Can you let me know what needs to be changed? Thanks in advance!

Posted By: Jono
Date Posted: 04 May 2009 at 2:14pm
If you're using AD (or another LDAP provider), I've modified a previous version to update all user information (and use their displayName instead of sAMAccountName). It's available from the MOD index ( http://forums.webwiz.net/mod-index-for-9x_topic24057_page2.html" rel="nofollow - http://forums.webwiz.net/mod-index-for-9x_topic24057_page2.html ).
 
NOTE: I've not updated it for the lastest version of WWF, but the code is documented.


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