Built-in attributes

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Last edited: Feb 27, 2023

Overview

This topic explains what LaunchDarkly's built-in attributes are and how to configure them.

LaunchDarkly allows you to target contexts based on built-in attributes. To learn more, read Targeting rules.

Using built-in attributes

The built-in attributes are kind, key, name, and anonymous. Kind, key, and name attributes must be strings, and anonymous attributes must be booleans. You can define additional attributes for a context by passing in a name and value for each.

The context kind and key are the only mandatory attributes. All other attributes are optional.

LaunchDarkly does not automatically populate built-in attributes

While LaunchDarkly provides built-in attribute fields for you to fill in, the SDK does not automatically collect any information. If you want to target contexts based on any built-in attributes, you must supply their values.

Here is a table explaining LaunchDarkly's built-in attributes:

Attribute name	Attribute example value	Notes
`kind`	"user"	The context kind. Required for evaluation.
`key`	"context-key-123abc"	Required for evaluation. This should be unique for each context.
`name`	"Sandy Smith"	This attribute is optional, but we recommend including it if you need to target flags to individual contexts.
`anonymous`	true	If set, this boolean attribute prevents the context from appearing in the Contexts list. If the anonymous attribute is set to `true`, LaunchDarkly treats the context as anonymous.

Creating searchable context keys

You can structure your context keys so they are both searchable and unique. To do this, we suggest adding a searchable term to the beginning of the key, followed by a unique ID. For example, if you wanted to easily search users that encountered a specific service, you could structure the key as follows: service_name:uuid.

Alternatively, you can set unique identifiers for contexts in your SDK configuration. To learn more, read Application metadata configuration.

You can view a context's attributes by clicking on the individual context from the Contexts list.

You can also use the REST API: Get contexts, Search for contexts, Get context attribute names, Get context attribute values