Automatic Registration - But Not to a Specific Journal

[dgalewsky]

I am working on integrating 'implicit' authentication using Shibboleth - into OJS.

One of the things I need to be able to do is to create/register a new user (using information from Shibboleth).

I have found the code that creates new users - in 'classes/user/form/RegistrationForm.inc.php'.

It all looks pretty straitforward as far as creating a new record in the users database - using the UserDao's insertUser method.

The question I have is regarding the necessity of specifying the journal that the new user is registering for.

I have a couple of questions:

* Will it cause problems if I don't create a Role for the new user? It appears that the 'Role' record is where the Journal key is kept.
* Can the user go back in later and set up a role (and specify the Journal at that point)?

Any other thoughts on automatically creating users?

Thanks for any input
-- Dan Galewsky
Texas Digital Library
University of Texas, Austin

[asmecher]

Hi Dan,

The role table is indeed the way users are associated with particular journals. Users can create roles for themselves later, depending on the journal's configuration (i.e. whether Author self-registration is allowed), but this process has caused confusion with readers before and should be avoided unless necessary. If you know from your remote authentication source which journal a user is associated with, it wouldn't hurt to insert a Reader role at the time you create the user account.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team