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User extended data
User extended data allows you to distinguish between different types of users, such as customer and providers or regular and verified providers, as well as share sensitive information to a transaction counterparty.
Table of Contents
User profiles have all four extended data types – public data, protected data, private data, and public metadata. A user's extended data is nested in the user's profile attribute, not a direct attribute of the user resource.
Viewing and modifying user extended data
User public and metadata are visible through the users/show endpoint in Marketplace API. In addition, the authenticated user can view their own extended data through the current_user/show endpoint. Operators can see all user extended data through the user retrieval endpoints in Integration API.
Authenticated users are able to modify their own public, protected and private extended data through the current user creation and update endpoints in Marketplace API. Operators can modify all user extended data using the users/update_profile in Integration API.
Types of users
By default, Flex marketplace users have the capabilities to be both providers and customers. However, you may want to limit those capabilities, for instance by only allowing verified marketplace users to create listings. Or you may want to have a three-way marketplace where only one type of participant can be in several roles – yoga teachers may want to hire spaces from venues as customers and then offer their events as providers. You can achieve these types of distinctions by setting specific attributes in your users' extended data and allowing them access to certain parts of the marketplace based on those attributes.
You can also implement different tiers of providers, where for example a regular (non-paid) provider is allowed to publish one listing and a premium (paid) provider is allowed to publish three. These types of attributes will need to be set to the user's metadata, so that only operators can modify their provider tier.
Revealing information within the transaction
User extended data can also be used for sensitive information that the transaction participants may want to only reveal to the other participant of the transaction. This type of information can include contact information such as phone numbers, or e.g. instructions to access a listing's goods or services in some other way.
As a part of your marketplace's transaction process, then, you can have an action that reveals the user's protected data in the transaction. In other words, the revealed protected data becomes also available in the transaction's protected data, and can be shown to either one of the transaction participants.
User filtering in Integration API
The Marketplace API does not have an endpoint for querying users. However, when you are building an integration or creating analytics, you can use the user query endpoint in Integration API.
To facilitate user querying, it is possible to filter users also by extended data when calling the endpoint. That way, you can segment your users by important attributes for more fine-grained processing. To filter users by extended data, you will need to create a search schema for the user profile.