User Context
The user context serves as a unique identifier for individual users and plays a critical role in ensuring consistent feature rollouts across sessions and devices. Typically represented as a object, the user context includes an id key that uniquely identifies the user.
In addition to the user ID, the context can incorporate various attributes to support advanced targeting and segmentation strategies. These may include:
- custom-variables: User-specific data points for personalized experiences.
- user-agent: Information about the user's device, browser, or operating system.
- ip-address: Location-based data to enable geo-targeting.
By leveraging these attributes, organizations can deliver precisely targeted features, maintain personalization consistency, and conduct granular experimentation for improved user engagement and performance analysis.
Important Note
The user context attributes differ from the attributes set using the setAttribute API.
- User Context Attributes: Primarily used for targeting purposes during feature rollouts and experimentation. These attributes help determine which users are eligible for specific features or variations.
- setAttribute API Attributes: Specifically designed for post-segmentation analysis, allowing you to segment and analyze experiment results based on defined user characteristics.
Current Limitation
VWO does not support using user context attributes directly as post-segmentation filters in the reporting section of VWO applications. For post-segmentation, it is recommended to rely on attributes set via the setAttribute API.
Usage
// Define the user context object to identify and provide user-specific details
const userContext = {
id: 'unique_user_id',
customVariables: { age: 25, location: 'US' },
userAgent:
'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36',
ipAddress: '1.1.1.1',
};
// The same user context can be used across different APIs. For example -
// Returns a flag object which can be used to get flag's status or variable(s)
const flag = await vwoClient.getFlag('feature_key', userContext);
// Track a metric conversion for the specified event-name
vwoClient.trackEvent('event-name', userContext);
// Send a user attribute to VWO
vwoClient.setAttribute('attribute-name', 'attribute-value', userContext);
User Context keys
| Paramter | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| id Required | String | Unique user ID for the current user. 'id' is the only required property in userContext. This ID should be a unique identifier for the current user which you need to pass to VWO. Read more here . |
| userAgent Optional | String | The userAgent object for the current user, can be used for targeting & segmentation. |
| ipAddress Optional | String | IP Address of the current user, can be used for targeting & segmentation. |
| customVariables Optional | Object | Any additional details of the current user that you want to push to VWO can be added here as key-value pairs, can be used for targeting & pre-segmentation. |
Note
You need to pass Gateway Service configuration while initializing the SDK for targeting (pre-segmentation using user-agent or IP-address-related segments).
Updated 6 days ago