Access User Profiles

Learn how to access User Profiles

To access any of the applications in your Authgear account, each user must have a profile in the account. User Profiles contain information about your users such as name, contact information, and standard and custom attributes you define. You can retrieve and manage user profiles in the following ways:

The standard attributes in UserProfile in OIDC are a standardized schema for representing the end-users identity information and you can not add or delete them. To introduce additional attributes, use custom attributes.

Prerequisites

  • An Authgear account: You need an Authgear account to follow this guide. If you don't have one, you can create it for free on the Authgear website.

  • A Registered App: You need a registered application (client) in Authgear.

1. Access user profiles from the Authgear UI portal

It is the fastest and easiest way to view user profiles and manage them.

Expand this to see the guide

To view see user profile of a specific user:

  1. Go to the Authgear Portal.

  2. Navigate to User Management.

  3. Choose a user you would like to view a profile.

  4. On the User Details page, you will see the Profile tab.

To manage access for standard attributes for all users:

Go to Portal > User Profile > Standard Attributes

To manage access and add new custom attributes for all users:

Go to Portal > User Profile > Custom Attributes and click Add New Attribute

2. Access user profiles from apps using Authgear SDKs

Once Authgear completes authentication and returns control to your application, it provides the user profile to the application. Most developers prefer to use the Authgear SDKs to get the UserInfo object using the fetch user info function. To start using this function read getting started guides relevant to the SDK of your choice. Here are some code snippets for different SDKs:

try{
    const userInfo = await authgear.fetchUserInfo()
} catch(e) {
    // failed to fetch user info
}

3. Access user profiles from Admin API

Authgear provides an Admin API GraphQL endpoint that allows applications and services to access and manipulate the User Profile object. The API Explorer lets users interactively explore the Admin API. With the API Explorer, you can search for users' profiles or update their standard or custom attributes. See the example steps of how to achieve this below:

Expand this to see the guide
  1. Go to the Portal.

  2. Navigate to the Advanced -> Admin API.

  3. Find a section called GraphiQL Explorer.

  4. Click on the GraphiQL tool link.

The explorer will be opened in a separate browser tab.

  1. Search for a user by emailand put in your query standardAttributes and customAttributes. For example:

query {
  users(
    searchKeyword: "bobur@oursky.com"
  ) {
    edges {e
      node {
	standardAttributes
        customAttributes
      }
    }
  }
}

4. Access user profiles from the OIDC UserInfo endpoint

The OpenID Connect (OIDC) UseInfo endpoint is a protected resource that provides information about a user when a service provider presents an access token that has been issued by your Authgear Token endpoint. The scopes in the access token specify the user attributes that are returned in the response of the user info endpoint. It is important to note that the openid scope must be one of the access token claims.

To access a user's profile using the UserInfo endpoint of OpenID Connect, you need to follow these steps:

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To access a user profile endpoint, you need to have a JWT access token in the header of a request to /oauth2/userinfo

We are going to use cURL commands in our API calls or you can also use Postman or similar tools.

Prerequisites

  • Make sure that you have a registered app type of OIDC Client Application in Authgear Portal.

Step 1: Obtain the necessary parameters

Open your OpenID Auth App configuration, and find Client ID, Client Secret, and check Authorization, and Token endpoints. You will use them in the next steps.

Step 2: Construct the authorization endpoint URL

The URL for this endpoint is usually provided by the authorization server and includes parameters specifying the requested scope, client_id, and response_type. Here's an example URL for the authorization endpoint:

https://<YOUR_AUTHGEAR_ENDPOINT>/oauth2/authorize?client_id={YOUR_CLIENT_ID}&response_type=code&scope=openid

Replace <YOUR_AUTHGEAR_ENDPOINT> with your Authgear server's domain, YOUR_CLIENT_ID with your application's Client ID from OpenID App.

Step 3: Redirect the user to the authorization endpoint

Next, you need to redirect the user to the authorization endpoint. You can just put the URL in your browser and log in with a user credential you are interested to retrieve an access token for. After successful authentication and consent, the Authgear will redirect the user back to your specified redirect URI, including an authorization code as a query parameter. You will need the code in the next step

Step 4: Obtain an access token

You need to make a request to the OpenID App's Token endpoint to exchange the authorization code we retrieved in the previous step for an access token.

  • The token endpoint URL is usually something like https://<YOUR_AUTHGEAR_ENDPOINT>/oauth2/token.

  • Include parameters such as grant_type=authorization_code, code=AUTHORIZATION_CODE, client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID, client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET, and redirect_uri=YOUR_REDIRECT_URI.

  • Make a POST request to the token endpoint to obtain the access token.

curl --request POST \
  --url 'https://<YOUR_AUTHGEAR_ENDPOINT>/oauth2/token' \
  --header 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  --data grant_type=authorization_code \
  --data code={YOUR_AUTHORIZATION_CODE} \
  --data redirect_uri={YOUR_REDIRECT_URI} \
  --data 'client_id={YOUR_CLIENT_ID}' \
  --data client_secret={YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET} \
  --data scope=openid

Step 5: Make a request to the Userinfo endpoint

Once you have obtained a JWT access token, you can use it to make a request to the Userinfo endpoint. The request to the Userinfo endpoint should include the access token in the Authorization header using the Bearer scheme.

curl -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  https://<YOUR_AUTHGEAR_ENDPOINT>/userinfo

If you are using Postman, you can enable the Authorization type of OAuth2.0, provide the necessary information for getting the authorization code, obtaining an access token and use that token to request the Userinfo endpoint:

See a detailed explanation of the structure and fields included in the response of the UserInfo endpoint here.

5. Embed User Profiles into JWT

Authgear WebHooks makes it possible to embed the standard attributes and custom attributes for a user's profile into the OIDC JSON Web Token (JWT). Hence, you access both profile attributes in the JWT returned to your OIDC client without making another call to the UserInfo endpoint.

See our post about how to Add custom fields to a JWT Access Token to learn more.

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