Hello Community,
It has been a standard for a while to store usernames in audit fields in Appian apps. A while back Appian added the ability for users to change their username.
I am just looking to see if this changed your approach for audit fields.
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For this reason, and best data practice, we use an "Employee ID" value for any piece of data associated with a user account. This ID is essentially the HR identifier for all employees in the company, and will never change. Usernames that can change are not appropriate for identifying employees/users.
We load this into our Custom Field 1 on the user profile and in our MSSQL "Users" data - any views to retrieve audit data / history are joined from the application data's Employee ID value to the Users data for real-time account information.
I highly recommend synching Appian user profile data to your database, in a "Users" table, this is invaluable for reporting, etc - if anyone has not done so yet.
My clients typically sync their users from active directory. This way, storing the username as an audit field is also save.
Is it safe? When the change occurs are you able to even know about it? For example a common use case could be someone's user name is based on their real name (first.last) and then they get married and change their legal last name. When AD makes the change now all the audit fields in your system have usernames for a user that doesn't even exist anymore. Furthermore you have no way to link them back together.
Again maybe (hopefully) I am missing something with the approach.