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Best Practice for storing user-related data?

User Service
#1

My app has quite a lot of data associated with each user, some of which I want to update without being logged in as the user (for example, updating a geocode if they change their address). When I try to do this via an event handler I get the “Property ‘password’ is required” error, which I assume is related to to not being logged in as the user?

Is it best practice to just keep just the standard login/backendless admin related things in the user record and put a relation to another record with supplementary data or is there a way to do it via the users table?

#2

Hi Andrew,

Please help me understand how you would know who the user is if they are not logged in?

Regards,
Mark

#3

It’s the user’s update event handler which appears to have the problem. This calls a function which, in turn call’s Google’s Maps API. I’ll check this again tomorrow and see if it’s my code which is the problem first!

Notwithstanding that, is there an issue with loading up the user table, or it is preferable from a Backendless point of view to store extra data related to the user in another table?

Thanks, Andrew

#4

It really depends on how you’d prefer to denormalize your data. If it is a matter of a single property, you can add it as a column to the Users table. If there is a whole separate entity related to a user, then it could go into a separate table.