Custom Account cancellation methods in Drupal 7

Krishna Kanth

Posted on July 22, 2015 - 9:52 pm

In drupal 7 whenever admin selects to cancel user/s account, it provides multiple cancellation options like

Disable the account and keep its content.
Disable the account and unpublish its content.
Delete the account and make its content belong to the Anonymous user.
Delete the account and its content.

In this post I am going to explain how to create a create custom method like ‘Disable the account and make its content belong to the admin user.’

There are two user API hooks available to achieve this - hook_user_cancel_methods_alter() & hook_user_cancel(). Before we start implementing lets discuss about these hooks.

hook_user_cancel_methods_alter()

This hook is used to modify account cancellation methods and can be used to add, customize, or remove account cancellation methods. After we invoke this hook all defined methods are converted as radio button form elements by user_cancel_methods() We can define following 3 properties -

title: The title of method (radio button's title).
description: (optional) A description to display on the confirmation form if the user is not allowed to select the account cancellation method. The description is NOT used for the radio button, but instead should provide additional explanation to the user seeking to cancel their account.
access: (optional) A boolean value indicating whether the user can access a method. If #access is defined, the method cannot be configured as default method.

In our case we are defining new method called ‘my_module_assign_to_admin’

hook_user_cancel()

These hook will be called on user account cancellations. Depending on the account cancellation method, the module should either do nothing, unpublish content, or anonymize content. In this case also following 3 properties can be defined -

$edit: The array of form values submitted by the user.
$account: The user object on which the operation is being performed.
$method: The account cancellation method.

In our case we are defining functionality for our method ‘my_module_assign_to_admin’

Let’s create module called my_module, using following code

/*
 * Implements hook_user_cancel_methods_alter().
 */
function my_module_user_cancel_methods_alter(&$methods) {
  // Add a custom method.
  $methods['my_module_assign_to_admin'] = array(
    'title' => t('Disable the account and make its content belong to the admin user.'),
    'description' => t('All contents will be assigned to admin user.'),
    // access should be used for administrative methods only.
    'access' => user_access('Administer permissions'),
  );
}

/*
 * Implements hook_user_cancel().
 */
function my_module_user_cancel($edit, $account, $method) {
  switch ($method) {
    case 'my_module_assign_to_admin':
      // Assign nodes to admin user.
      module_load_include('inc', 'node', 'node.admin');
      $nodes = db_select('node', 'n')
        ->fields('n', array('nid'))
        ->condition('uid', $account->uid)
        ->execute()
        ->fetchCol();
      node_mass_update($nodes, array('uid' => 1));
      break;
  }
}

Just enable this module on your module list page, you should see additional option for user cancellation -