Setting user attributes

Overview

This topic explains what user attributes are, how they impact what you see in LaunchDarkly, how to configure them, and how LaunchDarkly uses them to calculate and display flag settings for users.

Understanding user attributes

Users are people, services, machines, or other resources that encounter feature flags in your app. Any identifier that uniquely corresponds to a target can be designated as a user.

A more precise way to refer to one user is as a user object. A user object is a collection of a user's built-in and custom user attributes, identified by a user key.

LaunchDarkly provides built-in attribute fields for you to fill in, but the SDK does not automatically collect any information. The exceptions to this are the os and device attributes used by mobile SDKs. If you want to target your users based on any other built-in attributes, you must supply their values.

All built-in user attributes are strings with the exception of anonymous:

The user key is the only mandatory user attribute. All other user attributes are optional.

You can view a user's attributes by clicking on the individual user from the Users dashboard.

Viewing and managing users

By default, all of the attributes in your user objects are sent to LaunchDarkly. This data lets LaunchDarkly calculate the current flag settings for users and powers the autocomplete functionality throughout the LaunchDarkly UI.

Access user pages from the Users dashboard. To learn more, read The Users dashboard.

Creating private user attributes

You may not want to send all attributes back to LaunchDarkly. The security or data protection requirements of your organization may require you to limit what customer or user data is transmitted from your service to a third-party platform like LaunchDarkly.

For example, you may want to target customers by their personally identifying information (PII), such as their email address, without sending the email address to LaunchDarkly.

LaunchDarkly's private user attributes feature lets you choose which attributes get sent back to LaunchDarkly without sacrificing the ability to target user segments. This lets you create targeting rules and segments based on the attributes without having to send sensitive data back to LaunchDarkly.

Configuring private attribute settings in your SDK

There are three different ways to configure private attributes:

• You can mark all attributes private globally in the LDClient configuration object.
• You can mark specific attributes private by name globally in the LdClient configuration object.
• You can mark specific attributes private by name for individual users when you construct LDUser objects.

User keys cannot be marked private.

If you initially mark an attribute as private, LaunchDarkly will continue to treat the attribute as private in subsequent evaluations as long as the user is on the dashboard, even if you later remove the "private" designation from the attribute. If you no longer want LaunchDarkly to treat the attribute as private, remove the "private" designation, delete the user from the Users dashboard, and re-evaluate the user.

To learn more about setting these configuration options, read your SDK's documentation.

Setting custom user attributes

Custom attributes contain any other user data that you would like to use to conditionally target your users. You can provide custom attributes in the user object.

The value of a custom attribute can be of the following types:

• boolean
• number
• string
• array

If you set the value of a custom attribute to a JSON object, it won't appear on your Users dashboard.

Here is an example user object which contains custom user attributes:

1{
2"key":"YOUR-USER-KEY",
3"firstName": "Bob"
4"custom":{
5    "groups":[
6        "YOUR-COMPANY",
7        "YOUR-COMPANY-GROUP-2"
8        ]
9    }
10}
COPY