[keycloak-dev] User ids and usernames

[Bill Burke]

On 2/6/2014 9:48 AM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bill Burke" <bburke at redhat.com>
>> To: keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org
>> Sent: Thursday, 6 February, 2014 2:15:41 PM
>> Subject: Re: [keycloak-dev] User ids and usernames
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/6/2014 5:02 AM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>>> A user should have an id, username and email (what we have now). The id
>>> should be generated by the server and should never change for a user. The
>>> sub field in the token should use this id, not the username. Applications
>>> that wants to store information associated with a specific user should
>>> also use this id, not the username or email, as the id will never change.
>>>
>>> That means it should be possible for a user to change his/her username.
>>> Obviously a username has to be unique within a realm. We should then allow
>>> a user to login with either their username or their password. When a user
>>> is able to login with their username we can also remove the forgot
>>> username option on the login form, and only have a forgot password option.
>>>
>>> This would also help integration with social login as now we don't have to
>>> try to create a sensible username for a user on social login. Instead we
>>> create a generated id, and don't even set a username. A user can then set
>>> the username they want through the account management (or on the update
>>> profile action page if that option is enabled).
>>>
>>> If there's no objections to this, I'd like to add these changes to alpha2.
>>
>> Ugh, this is just a nasty change.  usernames will rarely, if ever,
>> change and I don't like the idea that users can change their username.
>> A principal name of "bill" is much more coherent than
>> "2341235234234-234123-234123-2341234".
>
> Doesn't matter does it? It's just an identifier, if someone wants to know more about the user they should retrieve the user profile.

User profile would then have to be retrieved for most apps as most apps 
would want to display the username.  Maybe add an additional token 
extension for the username?  So an additional REST invocation back to 
obtain the user profile doesn't need to be done?

-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com