Force unlocking someone using Edit+ on a page

#1

Matrix Version: 5.3.4.0

Scenario
Someone currently has a page open in Edit+ and is editing the content but are not necessarily there, they maybe sick or they have gone on leave for a few weeks and someone else needs to edit that page that they are still editing.

  1. How long does the Edit+ interface keep the lock on an item for even after shutting down all of the person’s browser sessions?

  2. If that person still has that page open in their browser and has gone on holidays, is there a way to release their locks or log them out of the system etc? Although you can forcibly acquire locks through the admin side, because they still have it open in Edit+, after awhile the lock is automatically reacquired by that person.

PS: I know this type of quesiton (or simliar) has been asked before but there seems to be no way that this is possible unless you can power off their computer or something, is that correct?

Thanks.

(Douglas (@finnatic at @waikato)) #2

There is one option you might like to consider.

The active lock by goneAwayUser doesn’t prevent goneAwayUser from editing it in another browser session.

So … you may be able to login elsewhere with a system admin account, and use the ‘Login As’ functionality to masquerade as goneAwayUser and then make the edit.

(Bart Banda) #3

Yep, I’d log in as the user, release all their locks, and then aquire the locks on the page they held that you need to edit. You can also steal their locks in the Admin mode if you are a sys admin user.

#4

Is there no way for one simple edit user to override the lock of another simple edit user. Our setup is that we have a central team who are the sysadmins and distributed publishing system where everyone else is a simple edit user. We don’t want the simple edit users to continually contact us just to override some locks from people in their area who are away. It would be nice if they could do it themselves.

(Bart Banda) #5

You could probably set up a trigger that lets you do it, for example, expose a page where the users could put somone’s username or asset ID in and hit a button which then fires the trigger and releases the locks on that user.
But it could potentially be abused by your editors as they might steal locks from users when they don’t intend to or need to, hence the feature only being visible to sys admin users in the Admin mode.

(Barb Kempnich) #6

We have a similar problem where Backend users need to be able to grab the locks from Edit+ users who have gone away without releasing locks (this is exacerbated by the fact that Edit+ keeps renewing their hold on the locks). I see in the manual that a System Administrator or Root User has the ability to Steal locks from other Backend Users. Is it possible to enable a Backend user to do the same for Edit+ users?

(Bart Banda) #7

Unfortunately not without a trigger. I think the way we will solve this in Edit+ eventually is how we did it in Admin for version 5.5 where we have a dedicated inactivity timeout setting where when a user hasn’t interacted with the screen for over 30 minutes, they automatically lose their locks and re-acquire them again when they do come back but only if no one else has grabbed the locks in the meantime.