dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Ngoc Thanh Nguyen <thanh.hispvietnam@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jason and Bob,

Thanks for rich information about various alternatives of this batched user
creation. Actually, someone pointed me to an email written by Jason about
this topic but the technique in use was R which I am out of competence,
thus I did not know that R can invoke a Java class.

Therefore, I was reluctantly looking at dhis2 module and try to mimic this
user-generator process. Above all of solutions, excel seems to be a good
way as it helps non-dev people to be involved. However, it might have to
also solve the problem of updating database which again will require either
sql or other scripting language. I think the best approach could be we
institutionalize this process by making an online utility that can generate
a sql file (or dxf whatever easier and more convenient) that users can copy
and run on their db.

Thanh




On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 11:58 PM, Jason Pickering <
jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Again, look at the R code. I tried to do this in pure R, but it didn't
> work. Therefore, I call the Java class directly to calculate the hashCode.
> I suppose one could delve into the depths of this part of the Java source
> code, but I did not go there. Easier just to call the Java class directly
> and not try and remake the wheel.
>
> Regards,
> Jason
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>> Ah Jason I've been down this path (in tcl not surprisingly) ...
>>
>> You are almost correct.  For short strings.  But there is some
>> conditional related to the length of the string.  Don't remember the
>> details.  I think the string hash code is run over a truncated string.
>>  I'll leave that to someone more enthusiastic.
>>
>> I mention VBA just because I guess excel would be a common environment
>> for creating these masses of users.  At least they did that in Rwanda.
>>  Mind you there is a horrible temptation to create these with simple and/or
>> duplicate passwords.
>>
>>
>> On 5 July 2013 16:46, Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>
>>> VBA? Really?
>>>
>>> It is pretty simple actually.. Look at the R code and it is
>>> "supersimple".  First you calculate the Java hash code (
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_hashCode()) of the user name and wrap
>>> this in curly braces and prepend the desired password. . Since the
>>> algorithm is well documented, I guess a creation of VBA function to do this
>>> should be simple.  Concatenate the password and the hashed username
>>> together, and calculate the MD5 sum of that string. What results is the
>>> salted encrypted password which should work for DHIS2.
>>>
>>> But then one either needs to create a series of SQL inserts (userinfo,
>>> users, usermembership, userrolemembers in that order) or I guess use DXF to
>>> import it all. Have done it in R, but not sure I want to try with VBA.  :)
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Jason
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 5:40 PM, Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I suspect what would be really useful is to have a VBA (or whatever the
>>>> .net equivalent is) of this hash algorithm so that it can be easily used
>>>> with excel.
>>>>
>>>> I started picking the spring algorithm with java string hash apart once
>>>> .. got about 80% through then got bored and stuck with java.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 5 July 2013 16:15, Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for this. Looks very useful. Another way to do this (which I
>>>>> have mentioned before on the list, is with R). Here are a couple of  R code
>>>>> fragments which I think I have sent previously.
>>>>>
>>>>> #Generate the Java Hash Code. R does not calculate this properly, so
>>>>> we have to revert to using Java for now.
>>>>> javaHashCode<-function(string="") {
>>>>> require(rJava)
>>>>> .jinit()
>>>>> s <- .jnew("java/lang/String", string)
>>>>> .jcall(s,"I","hashCode") }
>>>>>
>>>>> #Start to generate the encrypted passwords
>>>>> genEncryptedPass<-function(password="district",username="admin") {
>>>>> #This is needed for the digest function
>>>>> require(digest)
>>>>> digest(paste0(password,"{",javaHashCode(username),"}"),serialize=FALSE)
>>>>> }
>>>>>
>>>>> #Start to build up the data frame here
>>>>>
>>>>> result<-as.data.frame(cbind(usernames,passwords),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
>>>>>
>>>>> result$encrypt<-mapply(genEncryptedPass,password=result$passwords,username=result$usernames)
>>>>>
>>>>> So, with these two basic functions (javaHashCode and
>>>>> genEncryptedPass), you can generate the meat of what you need. If you have
>>>>> a list of usernames and passwords (which of course can also be generated in
>>>>> R) in a dataframe called "result", the last line will give you the
>>>>> encrypted password.
>>>>>
>>>>> Using SQL, you can then generate of course some insert statements or
>>>>> DXF to import into DHIS2. If anyone needs more code for this, I can provide
>>>>> some more details. I suspect the same thing could be easily done with other
>>>>> scripting languages as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think these Java classes will help but would suggest to abstract out
>>>>> these methods a bit as right now, the DB connection is hard coded?
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>> Jason
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Ngoc Thanh Nguyen <
>>>>> thanh.hispvietnam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> In case you need to expedite creation of thousands of users and
>>>>>> passwords the following classes might help. In essence, all of user
>>>>>> creation steps can be done by sql. However, password hash is a bit tricky
>>>>>> in dhis2 when it depends on Spring Security.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63702128/dhis2%20user%20generator/GeneratePassword.java
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63702128/dhis2%20user%20generator/RandomGenerator.java
>>>>>>
>>>>>> After having a list of username and password pairs you can use sql to
>>>>>> fill in users and userinfo tables, plus other germane tables for assigning
>>>>>> orgunit and roles.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanh
>>>>>>
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>>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>