Manually change user directory for user

Question

Hi. We've been using Confluence Internal user directory for a while before integrating with Active Directory, so we had to put the Confluence internal directory as the primary over active directory. Users that have the same names in both directories default to the primary directory, of course. Is there a way to manually override the directory used for a specific individual account?  Individuals with the same username is causing an issue. Rather than making active directory the primary, I would like to make it the primary for users with the same name. How would I be able to do this? Thank you for your help.

unknown · Answer

Two questions:

1) Has anoyone put a "feature" request into Confluence support for this?

2) Is there a way to "hack" the screen of this user addition area to add a selectable directory field until someone in Atlassian delivers the functionality as part of core product? If yes, any guidance on code for a non-Velocity programmer :-)

Jim Birch · Answer

Can't you just make your AD the first directory?  We had a set of local directory users that had the same name as their AD name.  When we upgraded we made the AD our primary directory and these local users became the AD users.  Any user attributes (like access rights, memberships of internal groups, etc) will in effect belong to the username rather than the AD user or the local user, so there is no problem switching to the AD source.

The general reason for using an external directory is to eliminate the creation and management of users in the application.  AFAICS the only time you would want to create local application users is for special entities that don't  exist in the external directory, eg, confluence-admin.