Node.js - how to track events by deviceId and then identify with profileId later

[pie6k]

I have a desktop app, but tracking happens in our node.js server which is a proxy between the app and openpanel.

How can I achieve this flow:

• new user opens the app without an account
• we track some events (we don't know user id as there is no user yet. So I'd like to use deviceId)
• later, user creates an account -> we know userId
• I want to identify the user now
• as a result I want all events made before and after user signing up to be visible as made by a single user

I was a bit confused checking the docs. I also realized alias function does not work

[lindesvard]

Hey,

This flow is almost possible today. I assume that you have device id in all your tracking calls so if you provide this as __deviceId in properties you'll be able to override our internal device id logic.

track('event_name', { __deviceId: 'dev_123' })

When ever you have a userId you can just provide it in the tracking call.

track('event_name', { __deviceId: 'dev_123', profileId: 'usr_123' })

If you would visit the profile usr_123 you will see all events (prior to "sign up") since we fetch all events based on the current users device ids (if that makes sense).

So if a user have had 3 different device ids we would fetch events from all these deviceIds.

pseudo query showing what i mean: SELECT * FROM events WHERE device_id IN (SELECT DISTINCT device_id FROM events WHERE profile_id = 'usr_123')

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Most of our reports today ignores deviceId (like funnels, conversions etc when we need to have a common id across events) but we can easily add support to group things by the device id (since this will be your common id)

After that change I think most of what you want is possible.

One last thing, currently we just do "append-only" meaning we never update historical rows, this is something we want to be able to do but its not so easy in clickhouse. I have on my todo to try out the new light weight updates. With these it would be very easy to update historical rows with the user id but for now thats not possible.