app_metadata discontinued or just the search, please be clear?

Help
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1

Searching app metadata, is this switched off permanently for new accounts?

Reading this document on app metadata: Understand How Metadata Works in User Profiles

specifically this:

New tenants, starting September 1st
2017, cannot search any of the
app_metadata fields.

Paid tenants (i.e. tenants that have a
credit card associated in the
Dashboard), that were created up to
August 31st 2017, can search using the
app_metadata fields.

does this means new paid tenants after August 31st 2017 cannot perform search?
We have build our framework to use app_metadata similar to this:

{
  "tenants": 
    {
      "id": "XXXXXX",
      "login_enabled": true,
      "role": "Administrator",
      "permissions": ]
    }
  ]
}

based on previous recommendations nohow to use app_metadata for multi-tenancy.

If we cannot search meta_data, this has massive implications and what is the alternative?

UPDATE:

I haven re received the email “Your action is required…” to use an alternative method to search by email, however what happens with other searches e.g., we have a multi-tenant app where all our searches include a filter by tenantId?

Is this change mandatory? as we have 2 implementations (since things changed between v1 and v2 and would have a lot of work to do, again… because of decisions made by Auth0)

Also what happens with older implementations e.g. which older non OIDC .net core libraries (3.7 I think) are those going be updated for the new changes?

In any event, this single new method won’t solve the problem for us or auth0 since we have other search criteria?

Is metadata is being discontinued? If we cannot search metadata, what is the point of it? and why not tell everyone this is actually going to happen?

This really not clear and very frustrating? We are trying to implement a new application waiting on answer and now need to build and go back and re-work implementation against unknowns, this is not a great experience and just gets worse.

2

I am still not clear on this, if we create a new tenant as a paid account, is the lucene search available on users & metadata? Why is this a difficult question to answer?

3

At this time, like the quoted documentation states the search over custom metadata fields is disabled for newly created tenants/domains independently of them being created as a free subscription or not.

In relation to the email, this was aimed at increasing the awareness around the search by email endpoint which provides a better suited endpoint for one of the use cases that the already existing user search functionality covered. At this time the endpoint just increases the available options for that use case; the recommendation would be to use that endpoint instead of regular user search if the query is for email, but there is additional reference information about this topic at https://auth0.com/docs/users/search.

Support for the above endpoint will be integrated in supported and applicable SDK’s, but have in mind that it may not happen all at once and there is no timeline defined. For the .NET case I believe support was added not just in that last major version, but also on the previous one.

For use cases other than the above one and that require search over custom metadata fields there is not yet a definitive solution available to all customers because like you mentioned some will have restrictions on which searches they can perform. Based on the information I have the current situation is not a definitive one and there’s plan on supporting additional use cases, however, that is something for which I can’t share any definitive information yet.

Have in mind that what was restricted was user search so user metadata is supported as before. I can’t say it will never change, but the reason user search changed so significantly and in such a short term was due to an incident where the lack of any restrictions would likely result in a complete unavailability of the feature for a more extensive period of time.

I understand that only knowing that there will be additional work to support more use cases for user search without having the exact definitions of how that will work and what would be covered is a problem source for developers, but providing you with additional information now and then that not ending up being a reality would be in my opinion worse.

4

This restriction makes a lot of documentation incorrect.
For example, the beginners tutorial uses a custom field (“hobby”) as a search criteria. As another example, the delegated administration extension has example filter hooks that return lucene queries that are now invalid. In fact, it immensely lowers the value or usability of the extension.

5

Yes, this was not a planned change and indeed some documentation did not yet caught-up to the reality. Thanks for reporting this and I already informed the team responsible for the dashboard tutorial. With regards to the extension and like you said this is even more a functional problem than purely documentation one so that situation may take some more time to get addressed.

6

Hi João,

Is there any comprehensive plan / roadmap for app_metadata search support ?
Like original poster, out multi-tenant application is largely based on app_metadata fields search feature, so any changes on this feature have a large impact on our own roadmap !
I haven’t seen any documentation update regarding actual support and proposed migration path.

Regards,

7

We also would like to use the Delegated Administration dashboard, but without the capability to filter on app_metadata.x, users will see everyone.

  1. Is there an alternative field we can use for this purpose?
  2. We’re willing to pay more if that’s what it takes to offer this service. (We’re currently paid subscriber.)
    Thank you.