Capture additional profile information about users

[jonrkarr]

(1) Create data model

• Affiliation
• Brief textual description (e.g., of scientific interests)
• Website
• Public email address
• Professional profiles: GitHub id and/or LinkedIn id
• Publication history: ORCID, Google scholar id, or id of NCBI bibliography

Rather than enumerating many possible linked accounts, users could enter key/value pairs of URLs (e.g., URl for LinkedIn profile) and their type (e.g., "LinkedIn profile")

(2) Persist the data

A nice option is to let Auth0 manage this
https://auth0.com/docs/users/guides/manage-user-metadata
https://community.auth0.com/t/how-do-i-allow-users-to-view-update-their-user-metadata/29957/5

(3) Add page to edit this information

[jonrkarr]

Done

• Model for user data is implemented.
• Form to edit user data

Todo

• Persist data

[bilalshaikh42]

There are two approaches that I can think of to take for this.
One would be to have the front end access the management API as described in the docs. This ties the front end to auth0

The other would be to have the front end simply call our back-end api for user operations. Then the back-end can be the one that interacts with the management api. This would have the front end be entirely independent of whatever user authentication system we use.

The user service would be responsible for making the call to our back-end API. All calls will already have the authorization token so the back-end could use that to then edit the metadata

I can work on seeing which solution is easier to implement. I think the SPA approach might be quicker to get running and then we can later work on having our own user records as a backup

[jonrkarr]

Do whichever you think is easier to implement.

[bilalshaikh42]

#201 includes all the needed front end changes to persist data and pull profile information
The API needs to updated to support the calls

[bilalshaikh42]

The API has been updated to create persistent user profiles in the database

[bilalshaikh42]

@jonrkarr
The set method on the API overrides the user object with the information sent from the site.
The form to edit the profile currently has blank values as default. We need the form to read the current information and prepopulate the form to prevent existing fields from being overwritten. I can do this as I work on #201 but if its an easy fix for you that would be very helpful!

[jonrkarr]

The forms can be populated using this.formGroup.patchValue(user). user can be an instance of User or an object with the same fields. This was working with the demo data. This should be linked to the handler for receiving the user data.

formGroup is an instance of FormGroup

The data in the forms can be accessed as this.formGroup.value. The validity of the form is this.formGroup.valid. Validators are easy to add. They're specified as an array of validator instances when the form control component is constructed.

[bilalshaikh42]

Done in #258