CODEWITHSUNDEEP
auth0
Michael Markieta
Michael Markieta

Reputation: 442

Can the Auth0 User ID change over time?

Theoretically speaking, if I wanted to base my Users database table on the Auth0 returned data and maintain a unique ID in my Users table based on the Auth0 user profile id, will I ever encounter a situation where the Auth0 user id has been changed? If so, what are the situations when a user id changes?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2327

Answers (1)

arcseldon
arcseldon

Reputation: 37125

The simple answer here is that the User Id will not change after creation for a given user profile in Auth0. However, there are a few other factors to consider, in particular:

  • Namespacing userids
  • Account linking

Auth0 will place a connection type prefix in-front of userIds to effectively namespace just the Id part - this is done with a pipe. For example, auth0|12345 or auth0|MyCustomDB|12345 etc. You need to ensure you use the entire userId, and not just the numeric value after the last pipe. The reason for this, is to ensure there are no collisions between Ids in IdP/Datastores in which Auth0 is the Service provider, & not the Identity Provider.

With regards to account linking, if you have two separate User Profiles - each has its own UserId. When you account link, one will become effectively the "primary" or "top-level" user profile, and the other profile becomes sub-ordinated as a "secondary" identity. And you can link multiple user profiles together as a single user profile in this way, but only one shall be the primary. You could consistently account link, so for example the DB Connection remains the primary, or you may just make the most recently created user profile (with a shared "email" in common to another profile) the primary... In this situation, the "tertiary" user profiles will retain their original userId, but if you were querying for the user profile only (and not trawling the identities array for that user profile also), then the effect on the search would appear to be the userId had changed. In actual fact, this is because what was originally a "top level" user profile, is now nested inside another use profile.

Finally, and slightly orthogonal to your original question - but where you state if I wanted to base my Users database table on the Auth0 returned data, hope here you were not referring to using the Auth0 user profile userId as a primary key in say a relational database. You would be better served creating a Surrogate key (unique key with no business meaning / outside dependency) as your primary key, Then store the Auth0 userId as a separate attribute on each tuple.

Hope the above made sense, please leave comments below if still unsure.

Upvotes: 7

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