Identify Users

If your application has logged-in users, you can identify users by calling the identify method. This is helpful to associate feedback with logged-in users and view their information like name, email, and company details directly in the feedback details. Additionally, your logged-in users will not have to fill in their details like name and email when they provide feedback.

identify(user: User, hash?: string)

This method takes an object with user's details. You need to call this method once your users log in to your application. You can call this method before or after the Userowl.initialize(..) method.

Userowl.identify({
  id: 'abc123456', //User's unique identifier
  email: '[email protected]', //User's email
  name: 'Simone Miles' //User's name
});

Parameters

User object

Company object

clearUser()

This method clears the user's information for current session. You can use this method when the user logs out from your application.

Userowl.clearUser();

Identity verification

You can use the hash parameter in the identify method to verify the identity of the user. This helps to make sure that that one user can't impersonate another. You can generate a hash on your server and pass it to the identify method.

Userowl.identify({
  id: 'abc123456',
  email: '[email protected]',
  name: 'Simone Miles'
}, 'INSERT_HMAC_VALUE_HERE');

Identity Verification works by using a server-side generated HMAC (hash-based message authentication code), using SHA256, on user's id.

How to generate hash

You can generate HMAC on your server using the user's id and your secret key. Here is an example code snippet in different programming languages to generate HMAC using SHA256 encoding.

import hmac
import hashlib
import base64

def generate_hmac(data, key):
  key_bytes = bytes(key, 'utf-8')
  data_bytes = bytes(data, 'utf-8')
  hmac_bytes = hmac.new(key_bytes, data_bytes, hashlib.sha256).digest()
  return base64.b64encode(hmac_bytes).decode('utf-8')

user_id = "user-id-to-be-signed"
secret = "your-secret-key"

hmac = generate_hmac(user_id, secret)
print(f"Generated HMAC-SHA256: {hmac}")

Custom fields

You can include additional custom data about the user with the identify method. When the identified user sends a feedback, this data will be shown in the feedback details in Userowl dashboard.

You can just pass the custom fields as key-value pairs in the User object. Only simple data types like string, number, and boolean are supported.

Userowl.identify({
  id: 'abc123456',
  email: '[email protected]',
  name: 'Simone Miles'
  customField1: 'value1', //Custom field 1
  yearsOfExperience: 13 //Custom field 2
});

You can also pass additional data to the Company object.

Userowl.identify({
  id: 'abc123456',
  email: '[email protected]',
  name: 'Simone Miles'
  company: {
    id: 'company123',
    name: 'Acme Inc',
    value: 10000,
    customField1: 'value1', //Custom company field 1
    numberOfEmployees: 25 //Custom company field 2
  }
});