Basic Administration > Managing User Participation > Participant Administration > Understanding Participants (Users, Groups, and Organizations) > Using the Participant Administration Utility > Managing User-defined Groups > Deleting User-defined Groups
  
Deleting User-defined Groups
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Do not delete a user-defined group unless you understand how it affects the system, as described in this section.
There two actions result in deleting a user-defined group:
• Delete from Windchill
• Delete from Windchill and Windchill Directory Server
The first action has the effect of deleting the user-defined group from the Windchill database. The second action is only available for user-defined groups in the directory server. It deletes the group from both the Windchill database and the directory server. To use the second action, you must have the required permissions to be able to delete user-defined groups from the directory server as well as the database.
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You cannot delete groups that are owned by a read-only directory server.
The results of deleting a user-defined group from the Windchill database are as follows:
• Users who were members of the user-defined group no longer belong to the group.
• All access control rules that specifically refer to this user-defined group are removed. If any users had access permissions derived solely from membership in the deleted group, it may be necessary to create new rules to restore the lost permissions.
• The user-defined group is removed from all notification lists within notification policy rules; if deleting the group from the list results in an empty list, then the rule is also deleted.
• If the user-defined group had been added to a local or shared team, the team membership shows the group as deleted, and if a user was a member of the team only because he or she is a member of the deleted group, then the user is no longer a member of the team. The deleted group remains on the Members table so that anyone managing a team is aware of the deletion. The deleted group row can then be removed from the Members table since the group is no longer a member of the team.
The following rules govern tasks associated with a workflow process when a user-defined group is deleted from the Windchill database:
• If a user-defined group is deleted after a workflow process has been initiated, but prior to assignment of a task, the group is removed from the list of participants.
If removing the group leaves no participants for a role, then the role resolution is determined by the settings in the wt.properties file:
◦ If the wt.workflow.engine.ignoreUnresolvedRole property is set to true and if the ignoreUnresolvedRole event configuration is set for this activity; then there will be no task created and the WfAssignment object completes so the workflow does not hang.
◦ If the wt.workflow.engine.ignoreUnresolvedRole property is set to false, one task is created that goes to the Responsible Role defined in the activity template. The default for the Responsible Role is the process creator. When the workflow process is started through a life cycle, the process creator is the creator of the business object.
For more information, see Activity Flags.
• If the user-defined group is deleted after a workflow process has been initiated and tasks are assigned, deleting the group has no effect on the process because the group itself is no longer being referenced. Tasks are assigned to the individual users that were in the group.
• When a user-defined group is deleted, it is automatically removed from the list of participants in any workflow process template. The group is also removed from any role mappings created as part of a life cycle or team definition.
• If a user-defined group is identified as a participant in a workflow template definition, and that group is deleted from the system after the workflow has been initiated, any task that would have been assigned to the group is reassigned to the responsible role. Generally, the responsible role is the user who initiated the workflow process.
By deleting a user-defined group from both the Windchill database and the directory service, the user-defined group is not included in search results and all results described earlier for deleting a group from the Windchill database also apply.
If a user-defined group is not removed from the directory service, a new group object is created in Windchill database when the group is selected from a search. This new group object is not the same object that was deleted and all of the results of the earlier deletion are still true. For example, the users who had been members of the group are no longer members.