Unfortunately, our company uses an employee's <first-inital><surname> as the username (e.g. jsmith). Since we use LDAP to validate credentials in JIRA, this is also being used as the JIRA username (cwd_user.user_name).
Now just imagine, somebody gets married and changes their name (jsmith becomes jjones). The company does not have too much of a problem, but boy does JIRA have one. Since this user_name is being used as a foreign key in umpteen other tables (jiraissue.REPORTER, jiraissue.ASSIGNEE, ..., ..., ...) instead of the cwd_user.ID, then changing the poor newly-wed's name is a virtual impossibility.
NOTE: this is not the "display_name" or "email_address" - changing those is of course easy; however, it should be just as easy to change the other "names" and "lower_names" in cwd_user (first, last, user, display).
Even worse, until I manage to change it in JIRA, he/she is unable to login (since his/her LDAP credentials are unknown to JIRA).
I remember reading a discussion about this last year. Unfortunately, their solution was a long series of handwritten scripts, updating effected tables. But what I also remember about the conversation was that it ended sometime in 2010, and that not a few times the entries were "... oh and I forgot about table so-and-so ,,,". In the meantime, I am sure that many changes have been made to the JIRA database design, so even more necessary update locations could fall through the cracks.
I had this problem on a much larger scale a few months ago, when the company changed from a neutral personnel number as LDAP username to the new format. To handle that, I made an XML backup of JIRA and essentially edited all occurances for each user. I do not want to have to do that now (involves downtime) every time someone gets married!
Does Atlassian have a supported means for performing this trivial task, or are there any gurus out there willing to take a chance and give me some help?
We are using MS SQL Server 2008 in production, MS SQL Server 2005 in an evaluation sandbox.
Cheers, John.
