Can I update the user ID of a user?

Question

We've noticed that the OOB login component assumes that you log in using your  user ID and password. This is fine if you never update the user name, but in our organization the requirement is to let users update their username. How would we need to implement this? We see two solutions:
1) username is in fact user ID. When the user updates the username we need to somehow update that user's ID or delete the existing user ID and create a new one. We do not like this approach as it looks like a lot of reverse replication will need to be done.
2) username is NOT the user ID. In this case it would mean we need to update the OOB login components as that component takes the user ID as input, not the username. We would need to use javascript to find the userID based on the provided username before starting the authorization process. We will also need to make sure that username remains unique across all users.
Any opinions on what would be easiest to implement. We don't really like any of the options. Ideally I wish we could just update the userID of a user as that would mean we can use all of the OOB components for login and profile handling. But I've read that this is not possible.

Answer 1

Hello,
I would refer you to not play with username (userid/principal name) and because you have this requirement i will suggest to add one more property to user node (/home/users) say user_login_name which will have same value as username (rep:principalName) while first time registration.
Now you have to do small tweak in your login module, every time when user will login you would expect value for "user_login_name" and once user click on login button before submitting for authorization you have to query to repository system to get actual username (rep:principalName) from repository and then use actual username for login. It means "login_user_name" will be just for display but back side you will be running same logic by small code tweak.
Now about changes to login_user_name can be easily placed as everytime you will be allowing user to update "login_user_name" not "username" but you must have to take care of one thing that there will be no duplicate "login_user_name" in system. For that you can write a listener which will be fired at the time of form submit or may be you can also do through client side script validation (you have to some research for feasibility at client side - may be "ecma" script can help).
For even listener plz refer - http://blogs.adobe.com/contentmanagement/2012/08/27/how-to-prevent-users-from-entering-dup licate-vanity-urls/
http://sling.apache.org/site/eventing-and-jobs.html
For more information or any issue in listener let me know.
Thanks,
Pawan