User::Identity - maintains info about a physical person

 User::Identity
   is a User::Identity::Item

 use User::Identity;
 my $me = User::Identity->new
  ( 'john'
  , firstname => 'John'
  , surname   => 'Doe'
  );
 print $me->fullName  # prints "John Doe"
 print $me;           # same

The CWUser::Identity object is created to maintain a set of informational objects which are related to one user. The CWUser::Identity module tries to be smart providing defaults, conversions and often required combinations.

The identities are not implementing any kind of storage, and can therefore be created by any simple or complex Perl program. This way, it is more flexible than an XML file to store the data. For instance, you can decide to store the data with Data::Dumper, Storable, DBI, AddressBook or whatever. Extension to simplify this task are still to be developed.

If you need more kinds of user information, then please contact the module author.

$obj->stringification When an CWUser::Identity is used as string, it is automatically translated into the fullName() of the user involved. Example:

 my $me = User::Identity->new(...)
 print $me;          # same as  print $me->fullName
 print "I am $me\n"; # also stringification

User::Identity->new([NAME], OPTIONS) Create a new user identity, which will contain all data related to a single physical human being. Most user data can only be specified at object construction, because they should never change. A NAME may be specified as first argument, but also as option, one way or the other is required.

 Option       Defined in       Default       
 birth                         undef         
 charset                       $ENV{LC_CTYPE}
 courtesy                      undef         
 description  L<User::Identity::Item>  undef         
 firstname                     undef         
 formal_name                   undef         
 full_name                     undef         
 gender                        undef         
 initials                      undef         
 language                      'en'          
 name         L<User::Identity::Item>  <required>    
 nickname                      undef         
 parent       L<User::Identity::Item>  C<undef>      
 prefix                        undef         
 surname                       undef         
 titles                        undef

$obj->age Calcuted from the datge of birth to the current moment, as integer. On the birthday, the number is incremented already.

$obj->birth Returns the date in standardized format: YYYYMMDD, easy to sort and select. This may return CWundef, even if the dateOfBirth() contains a value, simply because the format is not understood. Month or day may contain CW'00' to indicate that those values are not known.

$obj->charset The user's prefered character set, which defaults to the value of LC_CTYPE environment variable.

$obj->courtesy The courtesy is used to address people in a very formal way. Values are like Mr., Mrs., Sir, Frau, Heer, de heer, mevrouw. This often provides a way to find the gender of someone addressed.

$obj->dateOfBirth Returns the date of birth, as specified during instantiation.

$obj->description See Attributes in User::Identity::Item

$obj->firstname Returns the first name of the user. If it is not defined explicitly, it is derived from the nickname, and than capitalized if needed.

$obj->formalName Returns a formal name for the user. If not defined as instantiation parameter (see new()), it is constructed from other available information, which may result in an incorrect or an incomplete name. The result is built from courtesy initials prefix surname title.

$obj->fullName If this is not specified as value during object construction, it is guessed based on other known values like firstname prefix surname. If a surname is provided without firstname, the nickname is taken as firstname. When a firstname is provided without surname, the nickname is taken as surname. If both are not provided, then the nickname is used as fullname.

$obj->gender Returns the specified gender of the person, as specified during instantiation, which could be like 'Male', 'm', 'homme', 'man'. There is no smart behavior on this: the exact specified value is returned. Methods isMale(), isFemale(), and courtesy() are smart.

$obj->initials The initials, which may be derived from the first letters of the firstname.

$obj->isFemale See isMale(): return true if we are sure the user is a woman.

$obj->isMale Returns true if we are sure that the user is male. This is specified as gender at instantiation, or derived from the courtesy value. Methods isMale and isFemale are not complementatory: they can both return false for the same user, in which case the gender is undertermined.

$obj->language Can contain a list or a single language name, as defined by the RFC Examples are 'en', 'en-GB', 'nl-BE'. The default language is 'en' (English).

$obj->name([NEWNAME]) See Attributes in User::Identity::Item

$obj->nickname Returns the user's nickname, which could be used as username, e-mail alias, or such. When no nickname was explicitly specified, the name is used.

$obj->prefix The words which are between the firstname (or initials) and the surname.

$obj->surname Returns the surname of person, or CWundef if that is not known.

$obj->titles The titles, degrees in education or of other kind. If these are complex, you may need to specify the formal name of the users as well, because smart formatting probably failes.

$obj->add(COLLECTION, ROLE) See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->addCollection(OBJECT | ([TYPE], OPTIONS)) See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->collection(NAME) See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->find(COLLECTION, ROLE) See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->parent([PARENT]) See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->removeCollection(OBJECT|NAME) See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->type

User::Identity->type See Collections in User::Identity::Item

$obj->user See Collections in User::Identity::Item

Error: CW$object is not a collection.

The first argument is an object, but not of a class which extends User::Identity::Collection.

Error: Cannot load collection module for CW$type ($class).

Either the specified CW$type does not exist, or that module named CW$class returns compilation errors. If the type as specified in the warning is not the name of a package, you specified a nickname which was not defined. Maybe you forgot the 'require' the package which defines the nickname.

Error: Creation of a collection via CW$class failed.

The CW$class did compile, but it was not possible to create an object of that class using the options you specified.

Error: Don't know what type of collection you want to add.

If you add a collection, it must either by a collection object or a list of options which can be used to create a collection object. In the latter case, the type of collection must be specified.

Warning: No collection CW$name

The collection with CW$name does not exist and can not be created.

See the User::Identity website at <http://perl.overmeer.net/userid/> for more details.

User::Identity version 0.90. Written by Mark Overmeer (mark@overmeer.net). See the ChangeLog for other contributors.

Copyright (c) 2003 by the author(s). All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.