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

Server side Codegen does not inherently maintain user identity, so it requires to specify the identifying id value for each event. The codegen will automatically add two parameters to every Avo function in server side environments: anonymous_id_ and user_id.

Anonymous users

An “anonymous id” is used to associate events with non identified users, e.g. your device id. In Avo functions generated for events that do not have Identify action, both anonymous_id and user_id are optional, so you can provide either one. For non identified users provide the value of the anonymous_id_ and set user_is_ to null.

Workspaces created before July 2023 might not get anonymous_id_ parameters in the generated Avo functions, run avo pull with the --forceFeatures ServerTrackingWithDeviceId flag to include the parameter. You can contact us to have it enabled by default.

Identified users

User id is the id of an identified user. In Avo functions generated for events that do not have Identify action, both anonymous_id_ and user_id are optional, so you can provide one. For identified users provide the value of the user_id_ and set anonymous_id_ to null. Alternatively, some SDKs allow you to keep the anonymous_id_ and use both when calling the SDK, like (Mixpanel)[https://docs.mixpanel.com/docs/tracking-methods/id-management/identifying-users-simplified#server-side-identity-management]

Though both anonymousUserId and userId are optional make sure to provide at least one of them to be able to identify the user.

Identify action in server side codegen

If you add an Identify action to an event in Avo, the generated code with create an Avo function that requires both anonymous_id_ and user_id. It should happen at the moment when the user gets identified and the anonymous_id_ should be associated with the user_id_. Some SDKS require you to perform the identification manually, other do it automatically. An example of the manual case is (Mixpanel’s old approach)[https://developer.mixpanel.com/reference/identity-create-alias] to user identification

Server side codegen uses the logEvent callback in this case. logEvent will provide non-null values for both anonymous_id_ and user_id. Make sure to include Log Event and Identify action on the server side events.