Account

Endpoints
Notes
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From an end-user’s point of view, their account holds all of their data. From an API point of view, these endpoints deal with data in the User table.

As the endpoints typically use /account we tend to use account more often than user.

Notes

The consent field holds a number indicating to which level the user has agreed to the processing of their data:

0 : No consent given (yet)
1 : Consent given for processing profile data
2 : Consent given for processing profile & people data
3 : Consent given for processing profile & people data, and for publishing anonymized measurements as open data

Providing a consent value (that is higher than 0) is a requirement for confirming a User account. In other words, without sufficient consent, you can’t sign up.

The `control` field is about keeping it simple

The control field holds a number indicating to which level the user wants to be in control of the FreeSewing platform. It was added as a way to allow for progressive disclosure of (more) advanced features and settings on the FreeSewing website.

Possible values are:

1 : Hide all but the most crucial features. Make it as simple as possible.
2 : Hide the majority of features. Make it simple, but not too much.
3 : Reveal the majority of features, but not all. Balance simplicity with power.
4 : Reveal everything, but keep handrails and safety checks. Only intervene when I’m about to do something dangerous.
5 : Reveal everything, remove the handrails and safety checks. Get out of my way, I know what I’m doing.

The `ihash` and `ehash` fields are for search

Because we encrypt a lot of data at rest, it can be difficult for support or administrators to find users when they don’t know or remember their username because we cannot search on their E-mail address since that data is encrypted.

That is why we store a hash of the (lowercased) email address. This way, we can hash the email provided to us, and search the hash instead.

The ehash and ihash fields hold the hash for the email and initial fields.

The `imperial` property is a Boolean

If the imperial property is false, the user wants metric units.

If the imperial property is true, the user wants imperial units.

The `initial` field guards against account takeover

The initial field will be set to the E-mail address the account was registered with. It can never be changed.

This ensures that when there’s an account takeover dispute, we can always know what E-mail address was used to create the account, even if the E-mail address associated with the account was changed.

The `lusername` field should be unique

For the backend users Joost and joost are — strictly speaking — two different users. This tends to lead to confusion and possible impersonation. So we enforce uniqueness on the lusername field which holds a lowercased version of the username field..

In other words, lowercased username must be unique.

The `status` field holds the account status