User Administration

This section focuses on user administration tools and tasks.

Manage Users

The Manage Users table gives the network administrator a list of all user accounts in table form. You can access it by clicking the “Manage Users” button on the Dashboard, which is linked from the header of all Dataverse pages (if you’re logged in as an administrator). It lists username, full name, email address, affiliation, the authentication method they use, the roles their account has been granted, and whether or not they have Superuser status.

Users are listed alphabetically by username. The search bar above the table allows you to search for a specific user. It performs a right-truncated wildcard search of the Username, Name, and Email columns. This means, if you search “baseba” then it will search those three columns for any string of text that begins with “baseba”, e.g. “baseball” or “baseballfan”.

If you would like to assign or remove a user’s Superuser status, then you can do so by checking or unchecking their checkbox under the “Superuser” column.

If you would like to remove all roles/permissions from a user’s account (in the event of their leaving your organization, for example) then you can do so by clicking the “Remove All” button under the Roles column. This will keep the user’s account active, but will revert it to put the account on the level of a default user with default permissions.

List Users via API

There are two ways to list users via API. If you have relatively few users, you can get them all as a dump with this command with a superuser API token:

curl -H "X-Dataverse-key: $API_TOKEN" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/authenticatedUsers

If you have many users and want to be able to search and paginate through the results, use the command below with a superuser API token:

curl -H "X-Dataverse-key: $API_TOKEN" http://localhost:8080/api/admin/list-users

With the list-users form you can include the following optional query parameters:

  • searchTerm A string that matches the beginning of a user identifier, first name, last name or email address.
  • itemsPerPage The number of detailed results to return. The default is 25. This number has no limit. e.g. You could set it to 1000 to return 1,000 results
  • selectedPage The page of results to return. The default is 1.

Confirm Email

Dataverse encourages builtin/local users to verify their email address upon signup or email change so that sysadmins can be assured that users can be contacted.

The app will send a standard welcome email with a URL the user can click, which, when activated, will store a lastconfirmed timestamp in the authenticateduser table of the database. Any time this is “null” for a user (immediately after signup and/or changing of their Dataverse email address), their current email on file is considered to not be verified. The link that is sent expires after a time (the default is 24 hours), but this is configurable by a superuser via the :MinutesUntilConfirmEmailTokenExpires config option.

Should users’ URL token expire, they will see a “Verify Email” button on the account information page to send another URL.

Sysadmins can determine which users have verified their email addresses by looking for the presence of the value emailLastConfirmed in the JSON output from listing users (see Admin section of Native API in the API Guide). As mentioned in the Account Creation + Management section of the User Guide, the email addresses for Shibboleth users are re-confirmed on every login.

Deleting an API Token

If an API token is compromised it should be deleted. Users can generate a new one for themselves as explained in the Account Creation + Management section of the User Guide, but you may want to preemptively delete tokens from the database.

Using the API token 7ae33670-be21-491d-a244-008149856437 as an example:

delete from apitoken where tokenstring = '7ae33670-be21-491d-a244-008149856437';

You should expect the output DELETE 1 after issuing the command above.