User Name Changes

Question

How do others manage User Names in their applications?
We were advised to use FirstName LastName as the user name, the Description field is not used (screen shot below). We have single sign on enabled which uses AzureSSO and the employees 5 digit number assigned by IT.  
We have several name changes that we have held off on making in our application.  Our application includes a custom compensation model that also leverages the User Name and a separate security model within that module.  We can replicate the name change in the comp model and test;  however we are concerned about other implications that we have not considered.
Our implementation partner highly cautioned us from renaming metadata.    I fully appreciate the complexities with Entity or Account metadata name changes;  however in this User Name metadata, the implications seem small (historical logs will have the old name pre change and new name post change, possibly an impact to their folder on the database?).
Looking to understand what other's have learned and what you do in practice to manage name changes.

JackLacava · Accepted Answer

First, a general point: users and groups are not commonly referred to as "metadata" in this niche, that term is typically reserved for dimensionality artefacts (dimensions, members, cubes). So the warning you received is not necessarily related.

On the actual point:

OneStream stores and references an actual user ID behind the scenes, which won't change when you rename a user or group. As you mentioned, audit records will continue to contain names as they were at the time of the action being audited, but they will also contain the unchangeable ID, so you won't lose traceability.
the Application Database Filesystem is built around path names, and the user folder takes the name of the user, so anything stored in their personal folder will "disappear" after renaming. In reality, the content will still be in the database, but you might have to manually update tables FileContents, FileInfo, and Folder, to resurface the material.
The rest of the application should automatically pick up any change, since it's referencing IDs internally.
If you store things that reference the user in XML format outside of the app (i.e. version control etc), then those things might have to be refreshed after changing username, since they often use names rather than IDs.
You might want to check any rule, particularly integration/reporting ones, to make sure they don't rely on usernames to look for things.

DanielWillis · Answer

I personally wish OneStream was not so tightly coupled with people's names. I'd prefer to see some magic with folder names named as IDs and then presented as names/usernames. The perfectionist in me also hates the fact that user folders are named with spaces or other characters removed which has some interesting repercussions

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