Where is the Segmentio.Analytics.Client.Alias?

[janmechtel]

Alias
alias combines two previously unassociated user identities. This comes in handy if the same user visits from two different devices and you want to combine their history.

Source https://segment.io/libraries/analytics.js/

Can we have this in .net too please!

[ivolo]

Hey! Can you describe your use case a bit? We used to have sessionId as part of the server-side identify / track API (which would automatically alias if you provided both userId and sessionId). But we found that it was confusing people.

Most just send server-side events for already logged in users, and used analytics.js to track and alias unidentified users before they logged in.

I'm definitely open to to the idea of adding alias server-side, just want to make sure I understand the use case better!

[janmechtel]

We have a desktop app. (www.veodin.com/keyrocket)

1. user comes to site, gets tracked with kissmetrics using their "made up" id from the session.
2. user installs the app, we identify the user using a kind of windows user-id
3. user might give us their email, then we want to alias that email to the windows user-id (this happens in the desktop app).

Does that make it clearer?

[ivolo]

Yep - looks like we'll have to add alias! I'll let you know as soon as it's done, thanks for explaining!

[janmechtel]

We actually switched to the REST API today because our CTO wasn't fond of including the .net API + the JSON library to all our clients.

Side benefit: the alias works as you described, so we rely on that now. we start sending Tracks/Identify with userid = sessionid = XZY, then we switch to userid=email, sessionid=XZY which triggers the alias on Kissmetrics, exactly what we need.

No need to include Alias just for us any more.

[ivolo]

Thanks Jan. If anyone needs .NET alias in the future, feel free to re-open!