don't require email about balanced-api

[matin]

@whit537 that code is from @mjallday :-). You're the first marketplace that doesn't require emails, so it's never come up before.

This issue is approved and will be prioritized and tasked out. Thanks for bringing it up publicly.

[jkwade]

from @venuebook:

We'd like to associate multiple merchant accounts with a single email address, currently this is not possible.

If the email address weren't required for the creation of a merchant resource then the above request would be satisfied, no?

[matin]

@jkwade sure. We can't remove the unique constraint on account.email_address because it would be a breaking change, but @venuebook can put the email address in account.meta[email_address].

[KRecht]

The heart of the issue for @venuebook is that we would like to associate one e-mail address with multiple bank accounts. This is because some of our users have multiple locations and would like to link bank accounts to each separate location.

[spacedevin]

We would love it if the email address was not the unique identifier, an we could supply whatever we wanted. Right now we are sending a fake email generated using session info, and then updating the email address using our database uuids after the user has been created on our end (if the user needs to be created). This is just silly!

We do not collect email address from our customers.

I can see the benefits of allowing us to provide a unique when creating a user on balanced, but you already provide an ID for it, so I dont see the purpose in constraining it to email address.

[mahmoudimus]

I don't really see the need for the email_address field either, all that's needed is really a unique identifier, which can be called unique_identifier or something similar on the Account resource. @arzynik @whit537, take a look at the spec for creating an account.

Our original intention for this was to have a unique identifier and we made a gut call that it would most likely be an email address. Since that's not the case, I don't see why it has to be there -- we can deprecate the field and just add a unique_id field so the Account resource reflects our true intention of that field, a unique identifier to an account.

@matin, thoughts?

[matin]

all that's needed is really a unique identifier, which can be called unique_identifier or something similar on the Account resource

Don't see why that's even necessary. The uri/id on the account is already unique.

[mahmoudimus]

Right. Developers can use meta if they want to query accounts by their own identifiers.

[matin]

@mahmoudimus want to issue a pull request to https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/tree/approved ?

It sounds like the discussion is arguing for the email_address field to be nullable. Does this mean the unique constraint should also be removed? Does that cause a breaking change for anyone?

[mjallday]

It's breaking in that Balanced provides code samples where the logic is:

try:
    account = balanced.createAccount(email_address)
except balanced.DuplicateEmailError:
    account = balanced.findAccount(email_address)
...

If the unique requirement is removed then anyone relying on this logic is going to start creating duplicate accounts for their users.

[matin]

This is an approved change. The email_address on Account will be nullable but will stay unique.

[matin]

merged into master and will be deployed tomorrow morning

[mahmoudimus]

ping @whit537 @jkwade :D

[chadwhitacre]

Sweet! Make it to the Python lib yet?

[mjallday]

@whit537 balanced/balanced-python@d38d90a