User Profile is a common paradigm in software architecture. It is meant to centralize the code responsible for managing user’s data. With the increasing popularity of microservices, software architects have started to create a single service to consolidate this task.
We’ve recently created two tutorials to help you get started building your own system:
This content is part of the new searchable “tutorials” section. It’s open source, and the content is starting to grow!
User Profile
A User Profile consists of user-related data. Common data stored includes the user’s name, login, password, addresses, preferences, security roles, security groups, etc.
Why is Couchbase a good fit for this use case? The user is quite often the most frequently accessed data, and it will potentially impact the performance of the whole system. Some of the key non-functional requirements of a successful system that Couchbase can provide:
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Strong Consistency
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High read and write throughput
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Caching
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A flexible data model
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Easy and fast querying
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Natural-Language matching
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High Scalability
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High Availability
User Profile Step-by-step
In these tutorials, you’ll create a basic User Profile service step-by-step. These steps include:
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Setting up a new project (Spring or ASP.NET)
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Representing a profile as a class
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Creating a repository to access profiles
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Querying the data with appropriate indexes
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Search users with Full Text Search
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Storing user events asynchronously (RxJava or async/await)
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Configuring replication between data centers
If you’re just starting a user profile service, you can start at step 1. If you are looking to enhance an existing system, you can start at a later step.
Java and .NET Tutorials
That sounds like a lot of ground to cover, but these tutorials start with a simple profile and expand from there. These tutorials cover .NET and Java from idiomatic points of view, showing the strengths of the language/tooling that you’re already familiar with.
With Java, you’ll be using the Spring framework, so the beginnings of a repository are as simple as creating two classes:
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@Data @Document public class UserEntity { @Id private String id; @NotNull @Size(max = 2, min=2) private String countryCode; @NotNull private String username; @NotNull private String password; } @N1qlPrimaryIndexed @N1qlSecondaryIndexed(indexName = "userEntity") public interface UserEntityRepository extends CouchbasePagingAndSortingRepository<UserEntity, String> { } |
In C# and .NET, async/await are first-class keywords that make easy work of asynchronous programming necessary for storing a batch of events in a profile:
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public async Task AddEventsAsync(List<UserEvent> events) { var tasks = events.Select(e => _bucket.InsertAsync(e.Id, new { e.CreatedDate, e.EventType, e.UserId, e.Type })); await Task.WhenAll(tasks); } |
Next Steps
For more details, head over to the complete tutorial of your choice.
If you are a .NET developer, you can follow along with the .NET User Profile Tutorial.
If you are a Java developer, you can follow along with the Java User Profile Tutorial
If you have any questions or feedback for this tutorial, you can find me on Twitter @mgroves for .NET questions or Denis Rosa on Twitter @deniswsrosa for Java questions. As with everything in Couchbase documentation, this tutorial is open source and pull requests for improvements are welcome!
