Profile System Overview

Instant Messaging (IM) provides a complete set of profile solutions through its user profile hosting capacity. IM’s profile hosting service enables your users to easily set and pull profiles.

• IM can store profile information, ensuring that your data has remote disaster recovery, cross-region deployment, and auto scaling capabilities. In this way, you are completely free from complex processing flows, such as server downtime, multi-copy primary-secondary replication, and capacity scaling.
• IM provides the business processing flows commonly used in the industry, with which you do not have to worry about user profile business logic.
• IM provides professional operation processes and teams, ensuring 99.99% service quality annually and helping you offer services known for their stability.
• IM provides easy-to-use service APIs and easy-to-access guidelines, with premium services throughout the whole process.

By using IM’s profile hosting service, you will be able to:

• Store, read, and write standard profile fields.
• Store, read, and write custom profile fields.

Profile Fields

A profile is a set of data that describes user properties. IM’s profile system supports standard and custom profile fields. Profile fields have the following characteristics:

• Profile fields are expressed in key-value format.

• Key is of string type, and its name contains only uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.

• Value has the following types:
  a. An integer of uint32_t type (not supported for custom fields)
  b. An integer of uint64_t type (not supported for custom fields)
  c. A string of string type (the length of the string cannot exceed 500 bytes.)
  d. A buffer of bytes type (the length of the buffer cannot exceed 500 bytes.)

• You can configure the read and write permissions for each key. The read and write permissions of profile fields are as follows:

Standard Profile Fields

Currently, IM supports the following standard profile fields:

Custom Profile Fields

Custom profile fields are the user data set by each app according to its own business needs. By using custom profile fields, an app can add additional data to user profiles and perform read and write operations through existing APIs.

Applying for custom profile fields

To apply for custom profile fields, the app admin can log in to the IM console and choose Application Configuration > Feature Configuration. After the application is submitted, custom profile fields will take effect in 5 minutes.
When applying for custom profile fields, you need to submit the following information for each field:

• The name of the custom profile field (Key). For more information, see Naming Rules for Custom Profile Fields.
• The type of the custom profile field (Value). For more information, see Profile Fields.
• Read and write permissions of the custom profile field. For more information, see Profile Fields.

Naming rules for custom profile fields

The rules for naming custom profile fields are as follows:

• The name of the custom profile field contains the prefix and keyword parts.
• The prefix of the custom profile field is Tag_Profile_Custom.
• Keyword: the keyword must be a string of letters with a length no more than 8 bytes. We recommend you use an English word or its abbreviation as the keyword.
• Example: if the custom field to be applied for by an app has the keyword Test, then the name of the custom profile field is: Tag_Profile_Custom_Test.

Documentation

• User Profile and Relationship Chain (Android)
• User Profile and Relationship Chain (iOS)
• User Profile (Web & Mini Program)