Posted by t14 on September 30, 2009 at 9:12am
Hi
I was wondering is there a way to make use of information on another database to create user accounts.
I have a database with all my clients information already stored and I want to avoid duplicating the information on my Drupal database and I also want to take advantage of all the funtionality already available with Drupal user management.
All ideas and suggestions are welcome.
Thank you all for your time
T
Comments
Use the user api
The user API supports remote authentication. There's documentation for that, um, somewhere. :-) See the OpenID module or the LDAP module for examples.
That would still give you a user account in Drupal (you can't do without that), but all the authentication goes to a 3rd party system and you can pull in personal information from there if you want. That doesn't involve the Drupal database layer at all.
Thanks very much the openID
Thanks very much the openID module looks like an intresting place to start.
creating user from the database level
Hi
Is it possible to create a user on drupal by only filling out certain database fields. If so which database fields are mandatory in order to successfully create a user on Drupal.
The reason I asked this question was because I was thinking about using a database with the relevant user information already on it. When the user database is modifed in some way the drupal user database will also be modified. This way users can make use of SSO(single sign on) functionality for other resources.
I was researching openID and from my understanding, with openid users can use existing authentication information stored somewhere to log in to your site.
I also realised that you can setup your own openID server to store your user information rather than have them stored in a third party location. My only real problem with openID was that it seems like you can not limit who exactly can log on to your site.
For instance can I only give openID access to users on my openID server.
Off topic
This really has nothing to do with the Drupal database layer. That's entirely the realm of the authentication layer, about which I know quite little myself.
ah ok because I was thinking
ah ok because I was thinking if I am looking to make changes to the user database fields directly instead of through the application layer I would think that this was a database layer issue.
Unless you suspect that you can not simply create a new user account just by adding the details into the database?
Thanks for your help in advance
Well you can run any queries
Well you can run any queries you want against the database using the DB API. Whether or not that will accomplish what you want depends entirely on the system you're working with. This group in particular is for developing the DB API, not for support on particular Drupal use cases that happen to involve writing to the DB.
ok thank you I didnt realise
ok thank you
I didnt realise I was in the wrong place.
For anyone with a similar issue the user_schema() looks very helpful it also tells you which fields can be left null etc
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/user_schema/6
creating user from the database level
sorry posted the same thing twice