Title: Role based on Null value
Last modified: May 14, 2018

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# Role based on Null value

 *  Resolved [timmmmyboy](https://wordpress.org/support/users/timmmmyboy/)
 * (@timmmmyboy)
 * [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/role-based-on-null-value/)
 * I have a use case where an org wants to set a subscriber role if a particular
   header has an empty attribute. The header could have several different values
   assigned to it and all of those would be fine to get the default role but if 
   the header value is empty they’d like the user’s role to be subscriber. Is that
   something that could work with the current plugin or something I could make minor
   modifications to work?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  Plugin Author [Jonathan Champ](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jrchamp/)
 * (@jrchamp)
 * [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/role-based-on-null-value/#post-10278313)
 * There’s two easy options that come to mind:
 * 1. If all users have the header, then you can set the default role to subscriber.
   
   2. If only some users have the header, it seems weird for empty to be a valid
   value. You may want to replace the empty value with a special, made up value 
   like “__empty__” and then use that fake value in the Shibboleth plugin configuration.
   That way you don’t have to modify the Shibboleth plugin and just need to add 
   a custom function hook that checks for empty:
 *     ```
       if (isset($_SERVER['myShibHeader']) && $_SERVER['myShibHeader'] === '') {
         $_SERVER['myShibHeader'] = '__empty__';
       }
       ```
   
 *  Thread Starter [timmmmyboy](https://wordpress.org/support/users/timmmmyboy/)
 * (@timmmmyboy)
 * [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/role-based-on-null-value/#post-10278356)
 * It’s definitely a bit of an odd scenario for sure. #1 wouldn’t work because we
   actually do want the default value for the majority of users to be Author. We
   are trying to target a subset of users that won’t have access to the system (
   essentially graduates, terminations, and retirees at a school). Because there
   are different potential headers and values for various scenarios they figured
   the easiest way was rather than try to do multiple values (which I know isn’t
   supported and there were many values anyway) to just say “if this header has 
   no value they are a subscriber, otherwise proceed as normal”. So to be clear 
   all users will have this header passed to us, but a small portion may have it
   be an empty value and those are the ones we want to take action on both on first
   login as well as checking and updating the role based on that information. #2
   sounds like it could work in that scenario so I’m going to give that a try. Thanks!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Role based on Null value’ is closed to new replies.

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 * 2 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [timmmmyboy](https://wordpress.org/support/users/timmmmyboy/)
 * Last activity: [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/role-based-on-null-value/#post-10278356)
 * Status: resolved