Identifying unique users

When integrating with Partium using the Find SDK, there may be specific cases where multiple users may share the same authentication key. This affects our Partium Analytics as it prevents us from distinguishing between individual users.

For a more detailed overview of the problem and its solution, please refer to Identifying unique users in the Find API documentation.

note

If you are currently authenticating with Partium by logging in and you don't share your login credentials amongst multiple users, you can ignore this article.

Implementation in the Find SDK

It is possible to configure the Find SDK by calling Partium.init and passing a PartiumConfig object to it.

One parameter of this PartiumConfig object is the AuthenticationConfig, which is an abstract class that is extended to implement the chosen authentication method.

This abstract class has an optional property called externalUserId, which must be populated to ensure we can uniquely identify users.

For example, if you use the OauthApiKeyAuthenticationConfig class (a subclass of AuthenticationConfig) to initialize the Find SDK, you would set the externalUserId property as follows:

Partium.init(new PartiumConfig({
    ...
    authenticationMethod: AUTHENTICATION_METHOD.OAUTH,
    authenticationConfig: new OauthApiKeyAuthenticationConfig({
        ...
        apiKey: '<some-shared-api-key>',
        externalUserId: '655f26ae-9abd-48da-abad-dfd026e92671',  // unique per each user
    }),
}));

This way, we can use the value set in the externalUserId property to distinguish between users and enable better usage analytics.

Remember that although the format of this property is open, it is crucial that its value is unique for each user.