Identify users

By the end of this page conversations from a logged-in user show their name and attributes in the inbox, and their history follows them across devices.

Every install works without this step. Until you call identify, each device is an anonymous contact whose id lives in the Keychain on iOS and in localStorage on the web.

When to call it

Call identify right after login, and again whenever an attribute you send changes. Calling it on every launch is fine; it is an upsert.

Feddy.identify(
    userId: user.id,
    email: user.email,
    attributes: ["plan": user.plan, "is_member": user.isMember, "renews_at": user.renewsAt]
)

Feddy.identify({
  userId: user.id,
  email: user.email,
  attributes: { plan: user.plan, is_member: user.isMember },
})

What happens on the server

• The device’s anonymous contact gets your userId as its external id, plus the email, name, and attributes you sent.
• If a contact with the same userId already exists, this device’s conversations move onto it and the duplicate anonymous contact is deleted. The user sees one history on every device they log in on.
• Attributes replace the previous set as a whole. Send every attribute you want to keep on each call; a key you leave out is removed. Email and name are kept when you omit them.

Attributes

Send flat key-value pairs about the user that help you answer faster: plan, membership status, trial end date, account age. Values may be strings, numbers, booleans, or dates as ISO 8601 strings.

Anything over the limits below is dropped silently. The request never fails because of attributes, so a mistake in your integration cannot stop a user from writing in.

Limit	Value
Keys per contact	20
Key length	40 characters
Value length	255 characters after serialization
Total size	8 KB
Value types	string, number, boolean, ISO 8601 date string

Nested objects and arrays are dropped.

In the dashboard, Settings → Data attributes lists every key you have sent, with its inferred type. Give a key a label to change how it appears in the inbox, switch on In list to show it as a column, and Filterable to filter conversations by it.

Note

Attributes are for facts about the user. Device model, OS version, app version, and locale are collected by the SDK and shown with every conversation already.

Email

Pass email when you have it. When your project has a verified sending domain, replies are also emailed to the user, so they hear back even if they never reopen the app. Without a verified domain the email is stored but no mail is sent.

If you do not pass an email, the widget may ask the user for one after their first message, and only when your project has a verified sending domain.