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Trying to add a custom value on user lookup

  • 3 February 2021
  • 3 replies
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I’m trying to pull in custom value (it’s a property called “name” that we created) on the user lookup.

The goal: we’d like to view the User-Lookup sorted by “username” on our app, rather than the user ID (which is a string of long numbers)

Any ideas?

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Best answer by Saish Redkar 3 February 2021, 04:06

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Hey @Elliotspark ,
From what I know, we can only select and sort only on the default Amplitude User properties in the User & Account Look-Up tab/section. Not sure if this can be tweaked or not yet.

Here’s my take on the workaround based on my understanding of your end goal:
You might have to reset the User Id property as the value of your custom “name/username” property going forward if you really need to sort on that in the user lookup results. This could potentially cause user identification issues since the user id property won’t be consistent anymore ( numeric vs text ) and the instrumentation will have to be started afresh in a new project.
Hope this helps! 

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As @Saish Redkar has mentioned, it is indeed limited to the Amplitude default User Properties.

One thing to note regarding his suggestion is that we would normally encourage you to set your User ID as something that will not change. In the case of a username, if there is a scenario in which your user changes their username, Amplitude will then treat them as a completely new user. You can read more about assigning User IDs by referring to this article: Assigning User IDs

 

Would it be possible for you a share a little more about your use case on why you would like to sort it by this Username/have the ability to add columns to the User Lookup page? That way, I can help you to share this with our Product team!

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Hello, we also would like this as well. I’m happy to share a bit more about our use case. We use UUIDs as our User Ids because that is what we have as our primary key in the database for our users. We chose to do this based on the documentation provided by Amplitude since this ID will never change for a user.

 

However, visually parsing UUIDs and separating them from one another in the User Lookup is a nightmarish task and detracts from our ability to grasp value from User Lookup. We are happy with 1 of 2 possible solutions.

1) We provide a more readable user property that is then viewable as a column in the User Lookup view. (currently custom user properties are not available to select as a column)

2) Amplitude provides a randomly generated unique(ish) friendly name for users that are then shown in the Lookup view (and elsewhere?)

I think the 2nd option would be quite nice for all Amplitude users and would be good to consider on your side. This creates a personable aspect to the data you’re viewing in Amplitude and allows you to refer to a users behavior by an identifiable name, even if it’s fake, instead of a UUID.

Hoping for some path forward on this soon!

 

Thanks,

Jack

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