assign-to as drop-down: user needs to have logged in to appear in list

[mjs@…]

As described on TracTickets#Assign-toasDrop-DownList, for a user to appear in the assign to drop-down list, they need to have logged in first. This easy to forget. (As well as being somewhat annoying: a common use case for me is to create a user and immediately assign them a ticket.)

This should be changed so that users who can login (irrespective of whether they have or not) appear in the list.

[eblot]

I don't see how this could happen easily, as:

1. the exhaustive list of users that may log in the system may be undefined, depending on the authentication back end
2. the list may be very long / may grow very fast

However, I think it would be nice if the administrator could provide a list of logins; in other words the drop-down list could be preloaded, but I don't think the preload could be automated.

[mjs@…]

Replying to eblot:

I don't see how this could happen easily, as: 1. the exhaustive list of users that may log in the system may be undefined, depending on the authentication back end 1. the list may be very long / may grow very fast

With regard to (2), I don't see how a change in the way the list is populated would affect the length of the list, or the speed with which increases in length. I would have thought that in most cases the users who CAN login eventually DO login, so the list length is ultimately the same.

I appreciate that given the way authentication works in Trac, it will be difficult to automatically populate the list. It would be useful if there were some way to pre-populate the list though, as you suggest.

[eblot]

Replying to mjs@beebo.org:

With regard to (2), I don't see how a change in the way the list is populated would affect the length of the list, or the speed with which increases in length. I would have thought that in most cases the users who CAN login eventually DO login, so the list length is ultimately the same.

If Trac auto-populates the list with all the users available on the system (i.e. users who may log in), this could make the list to go crazy: imagine a company-wide directory, for example.

I think an administrator tool to populate the list if the best-effort solution at this point - with an option to select all the users available on the system, if the admin really wants it.

This feature might be tied to the IUserDirectory interface (#2456)

[cboos]

See rather #3580.