User responses from various APIs are inconsistent

[danwom]

The user objects returned by various APIs have different subsets of fields. Some of these issues were addressed by various PRs from @friendtocephalopods, but we should go one step further.

Frontend currently tries to sanitize these user objects but should expect better data from various APIs.

For example the User objects in table owners and table readers contains just the email.

[feng-tao]

@danwom I think the history context is that table owner/reader could be any email as it just relies on user input. E.g if an user add a new team email which it hasn't indexed yet, there are no other infos to fill other fields of the user objects.

[friendtocephalopods]

I think in that case we should still use the same User object and just make the other fields optional. WDYT?

[jinhyukchang]

Need to dive deeper to see fields mismatching vs frontend dealing with optional fields but
would it be sufficient to have these fields in User schema:
user_id
email
full_name
display_name

and deprecate name replaced by full_name?

[worldwise001]

I am curious at how users are populated by internal auth mechanisms at other companies. At Square we populate username, since that is globally unique, and no user can reuse an existing username. For this reason I am inclined to make user_id required, and the rest optional.

user_id
email
full_name
display_name

as a set of sufficient fields in the User schema is totally fine.

[worldwise001]

Specifically here the username != email, and the email address is not necessarily @squareup.com

[danwom]

@worldwise001 I agree, user_id should be required.

In fact I think all resources (user, table, dashboard) should come pre-baked with a unique id. I would suggest using the same field name to be consistent (currently user_id, key, and uri). We could then add a type field so the combination of id and type would be universally unique, or we can bake the type into the id like "id": "user:danwom"

[feng-tao]

@danwom what id are you referring to? across the whole system or just fe? if former, we have key uri across the stacks.

[danwom]

@feng-tao the former for sure. I don't think we currently expose uri for tables, but I know its planned for dashboards. Does it make sense for users to have uri?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[feng-tao]

I assume the issue could be closed now. Feel free to reopen if it is not the case.