Cannot flag user as deleted

[Jeff Davis]

Evergreen provides no way to flag a user as deleted, except at the database level. The existing open-ils.actor.user.delete method (which the Delete Patron function in the staff client uses) is really an irrevocable purge-and-anonymize function; this is undesirable in some situations. It would be useful to have separate functions for deleting and purging patrons.

[Jeff Davis (jdavis-sitka)]

I've pushed a commit to the user/jeffdavis/lp1400829-flag-user-as-deleted branch of the working repo:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=commitdiff;h=5165881

This adds a new open-ils.actor.user.flag_as_deleted method, plus a new open-ils.actor.user.delete_card method for deleting cards, plus the requisite permissions for both. No changes are made to the user interface, so this is really just a first step, but it's useful to have the functionality as part of the Evergreen API. (Sitka has a custom web interface for batch patron deletion which relies on these new methods.)

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

I wonder if we want to merge the back end code without support in the staff client?

Furthermore, I'm considering this a new feature, so staff client changes should probably wait until after the web staff client is in general use, or should be added to the existing web staff client code as well as the XUL staff client. Is that the consensus, or am I just making that up?

[Ben Shum (bshum)]

Jason, I believe that consensus (from past developer meetings) was not to make significant changes to the existing XUL staff client while the web client work was underway. Or at least, not unless changes were being made to both interfaces accordingly so that feature parity would exist. So yes, your assumptions are correct.

Even though it seems that adding the new functionality without any way for end-users to access it via the client seems strange, I'm not opposed to the addition of the code as seen fit by the rest of you. Not everything has to be immediately relevant I guess.

Needs to have a release note though, since we're adding new permissions to the system, along with a corresponding entry that says that this only applies to the back end for now, until such time as new interfaces are coded up?

Others are free to weigh in on this issue.

[Jeff Davis (jdavis-sitka)]

Pushed release notes to the user/jeffdavis/lp1400829-flag-user-as-deleted branch, noting that the new functionality is not exposed in the UI yet.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

At the moment, the proposed open-ils.actor.user.flag_as_deleted will let you mark as deleted a user that has open billable transactions, which seems a bit risky. I think that the checks in really_delete_user() should be moved into their own routine, then used to guard both open-ils.actor.user.flag_as_deleted and open-ils.actor.user.delete.

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

Following up on Galen's comment on this bug, I'm going to remove the pullsrequest tag and add a needsrepatch tag.

[Lindsay Stratton (lstratton)]

Noting this related bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1931869, delete user from bucket needs separate permission from purge user, 2021-06-14