Easy to forget to create custom attributes before storing the data

[fungc-io]

Problem

In a recent project I'm in, some developers uses a new custom attribute without creating it in the portal first. They didn't know the data were not stored and some production data were lost after deployment.

Appetite

2 weeks

Solution

few ideas for this problem:

Warn developers when storing an inexistent attribute

• We still keep the requirement of first creating the attribute, but return a clear error message when the developer attempt to update an inexistent custom attribute

Always accept user attributes

• When the user attribute key does not match any of the created, store it in the database but hidden from any view.
• When the developer creates the key later, the stored value is shown.

Cons: Hard to do validation and maybe a lot of hidden data stored.

Allow a json object in the user attribute

• The user can store a JSON object freely to a user attribute with a size limit, so they can use different shape of data for different users.

Cons: These attributes are very difficult to be presented in the portal and /settings page as editable fields.