Handling anonymous and identified users in the client and on the server
User identity in the client side Codegen
Anonymous users
When working with anonymous users, analytics SDKs automatically assign anonymous user ids on a per-client level.
When a user is identified the anonymous events are associated with the identified user.
You don't need to do additional actions for this logic to work on the client side, so you are not required to provide anonymousUserId anywhere.
Identified users
Client side Analytics SDKs can store the information about the currently logged in user. It makes possible to identify user once and then send all subsequent tracking calls on behalf of the identified user.
To make an Avo function identify a user you add the Identify action to the corresponding Avo event in your tracking plan. Learn more about the Identify action.
Codegen corresponding to the events with Identify action will require a userId parameter automatically.
User identity in the server side Codegen
Anonymous users
Server side Codegen does not have a way to maintain user identity.
That's why if you want to associate events with particular users before they identify, you need to pass the anonymousUserId string parameter to your Codegen.
An optional anonymousUserId parameter is available on demand in all server languages, run avo pull with the --forceFeatures ServerTrackingWithDeviceId flag if you don't see it in your generated code. You can contact us to have it enabled by default.
Identified users
Given the server side functions can not maintain user identity, once the user is identified you still have to provide the userId with every function call.
A userId parameter is automatically required in all the server side Codegen functions.
The Identify action does not change the server codegen functions. Every single function is effectively an identify function, because you need to provide user id all the time.
Though both
anonymousUserIdanduserIdare optional make sure to provide one of them to be able to identify the user.