Model Your Users

Everything starts with people. Before Wayfinder can sign anyone in, ThunderID needs to know what its users look like. This page defines the two kinds of user Wayfinder has, then creates a first customer to sign in with.

User Types

Before anyone can sign up, ThunderID needs to know what a customer record looks like: which fields it has, which are required, and which one holds a password. That definition is a user type, a schema for one category of person (a template, not a person), and every user inherits exactly one. Wayfinder needs two, a Customer type and a separate Staff type for the internal team; keeping them distinct keeps customer access separate from staff access downstream.

See User Types for the attribute types, constraints, and credential options a user type supports.

Create Wayfinder's two user types:

1

Create the Customer user type

Navigate to User Types → Create User Type. Define the schema:

Attribute	Type	Properties
username	string	Required, unique
email	string	Required, unique
password	string	Credential
given_name	string	Optional
family_name	string	Optional
sub	string	Optional

See User Types.

2

Create the Staff user type

Navigate to User Types → Create User Type. Define the schema:

Attribute	Type	Notes
username	string	Required, unique
email	string	Required, unique
password	string	Credential
displayName	string	Captured on invitation accept

See User Types.

Users

Those two types are still just templates. Wayfinder's actual people are users: real records that conform to a type, each one holding a real person's username, email, and credential.

The two types fill up in opposite ways. Customer users mostly aren't created by hand; each one appears the moment someone completes the app's sign-up flow, which is why a consumer product can grow to millions of them without anyone provisioning accounts. The first Staff user, by contrast, is created directly, so at least one person exists to start inviting the rest of the team in.

See Manage Users.

Create the first customer by hand so you have someone to sign in with (later ones arrive through the registration flow):

1

Create John Doe as a Customer

Navigate to Users → Add User. Select Customer as the user type and click Create User. Fill in the schema attributes (username: john.doe, email: john.doe@example.com, password: john.doe) and complete the user creation.