Deleted Users, are they recoverable?

Jill Freidmutter · August 2016

Hi Brilliant RE Admins and Gurus,

I am hoping that you might be able to offer insights. There are several users that were deleted from RE -- student interns and staff who no longer work here. I realize that was not the best thing to do, because now I can't query on the user names for "Created by" fields. I tried to recreate a user by creating a new user with the same name as the intern. Let's call her 'Intern'. When I created a query for actions created by 'Intern' the list was empty. The records created by the original 'Intern' were not selected, which let me know that the record does not using the actual name in the 'Created by' field. It must be using a key or index number from the User Table (as a database would). Which leads me to believe that the deleted users still exist in the User table -- they are just not visible. Has anyone out there recovered or recreated deleted users? Thank you for engaging about this.

best, Jill

Emmet O'Conlon 2 · August 2016

Jill Freidmutter:

Hi Brilliant RE Admins and Gurus,

I am hoping that you might be able to offer insights. There are several users that were deleted from RE -- student interns and staff who no longer work here. I realize that was not the best thing to do, because now I can't query on the user names for "Created by" fields. I tried to recreate a user by creating a new user with the same name as the intern. Let's call her 'Intern'. When I created a query for actions created by 'Intern' the list was empty. The records created by the original 'Intern' were not selected, which let me know that the record does not using the actual name in the 'Created by' field. It must be using a key or index number from the User Table (as a database would). Which leads me to believe that the deleted users still exist in the User table -- they are just not visible. Has anyone out there recovered or recreated deleted users? Thank you for engaging about this.

best, Jill

This doesn't address the issue directly, but... Have you considered using the query operator "Not One Of" and then bringing over all your current users? This may give you too many results, but will at least give you all the records created by all deleted users.

Tomasz Malkiewicz 2 · August 2016

Jill Freidmutter:

Hi Brilliant RE Admins and Gurus,

I am hoping that you might be able to offer insights. There are several users that were deleted from RE -- student interns and staff who no longer work here. I realize that was not the best thing to do, because now I can't query on the user names for "Created by" fields. I tried to recreate a user by creating a new user with the same name as the intern. Let's call her 'Intern'. When I created a query for actions created by 'Intern' the list was empty. The records created by the original 'Intern' were not selected, which let me know that the record does not using the actual name in the 'Created by' field. It must be using a key or index number from the User Table (as a database would). Which leads me to believe that the deleted users still exist in the User table -- they are just not visible. Has anyone out there recovered or recreated deleted users? Thank you for engaging about this.

best, Jill

The query is not using the username (Intern) as a link. It uses user's system ID and therefore recreating users is not going to help as they will have te same usernames but different IDs. I'm afraid you have lost that information.

Tom

James Andrews · August 2016

Jill Freidmutter:

Hi Brilliant RE Admins and Gurus,

I am hoping that you might be able to offer insights. There are several users that were deleted from RE -- student interns and staff who no longer work here. I realize that was not the best thing to do, because now I can't query on the user names for "Created by" fields. I tried to recreate a user by creating a new user with the same name as the intern. Let's call her 'Intern'. When I created a query for actions created by 'Intern' the list was empty. The records created by the original 'Intern' were not selected, which let me know that the record does not using the actual name in the 'Created by' field. It must be using a key or index number from the User Table (as a database would). Which leads me to believe that the deleted users still exist in the User table -- they are just not visible. Has anyone out there recovered or recreated deleted users? Thank you for engaging about this.

best, Jill

Tomasz is correct -- the query module offers you the username but in reality that's not how it's linked.

If you have RODBA or back-end database access, you can get at this information fairly easily -- you are correct that the user info is not removed from the table when a user is deleted; there is a field in the users table called "deleted" that is marked as true when they are. So with some fairly simple sql you can find the system ID of the former intern and get yourself a list of action import IDs, and use that for your query.

I just looked in the sample DB since I don't have that level of permissions in our production DB, and I don't see a way in the standard user management area to "undelete" a user, so it pretty much has to be back-end to make this work.

Jill Freidmutter · August 2016

Emmet O'Conlon:

Jill Freidmutter:

Hi Brilliant RE Admins and Gurus,

I am hoping that you might be able to offer insights. There are several users that were deleted from RE -- student interns and staff who no longer work here. I realize that was not the best thing to do, because now I can't query on the user names for "Created by" fields. I tried to recreate a user by creating a new user with the same name as the intern. Let's call her 'Intern'. When I created a query for actions created by 'Intern' the list was empty. The records created by the original 'Intern' were not selected, which let me know that the record does not using the actual name in the 'Created by' field. It must be using a key or index number from the User Table (as a database would). Which leads me to believe that the deleted users still exist in the User table -- they are just not visible. Has anyone out there recovered or recreated deleted users? Thank you for engaging about this.

best, Jill

This doesn't address the issue directly, but... Have you considered using the query operator "Not One Of" and then bringing over all your current users? This may give you too many results, but will at least give you all the records created by all deleted users.

Yes, I can do that. What it doesn't allow me to do is separate out the different former users. I wouldn't be able to add a comment "entered by Intern A".

James Andrews · August 2016

Jill Freidmutter:

Yes, I can do that. What it doesn't allow me to do is separate out the different former users. I wouldn't be able to add a comment "entered by Intern A".

You could do that outside of RE. Create the action query with the "not one of" like Emmet suggested. Then do an action export and include the "added by" field and the action import ID. The deleted usernames will still show up in the export, so outside of RE in excel or access or something, you can sort by the added by field, add your comment or note, and import the information back into RE.

Jill Freidmutter · August 2016

James Andrews:

Jill Freidmutter:

Yes, I can do that. What it doesn't allow me to do is separate out the different former users. I wouldn't be able to add a comment "entered by Intern A".

You could do that outside of RE. Create the action query with the "not one of" like Emmet suggested. Then do an action export and include the "added by" field and the action import ID. The deleted usernames will still show up in the export, so outside of RE in excel or access or something, you can sort by the added by field, add your comment or note, and import the information back into RE.

Brilliant! It's probably not worth the effort, but I love knowing that I can do it! Thank you for solving this.

Deleted Users, are they recoverable?

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