cannot set user_id to null

[choran]

Description

• It is not possible to clear a user_id value using the .NET SDK
  • Setting it to null does not send the data to the API
• curl request as expected and allows it

  We support setting user_id to nil (tested it) I can understand the logic in wanting to remove user_ids from your users which we support.

• • *

Evidence

UsersClient usersClient = new UsersClient(new Authentication(TOKEN));
User user = usersClient.View("598bd1ef1f40af9c8d64ceb0");
Console.WriteLine(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(user));
user.user_id = null;
user = usersClient.Update(user);
Console.WriteLine(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(user));
user = usersClient.View("598bd1ef1f40af9c8d64ceb0");
Console.WriteLine(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(user));

If you run the above code you will see that it does not change the suer_id

[kmossco]

Working on this one and it seems that somewhere where we serialize the JSON object to be sent to the Intercom servers, we are disregarding any changes to null.

If I try to run the code in the OP there I get the following payload:

"params":{"id":"5a045c938b874d2a82e7413a","email":"bobz12@example.com","avatar":{"type":"avatar"},"signed_up_at":1511349783,"last_seen_ip":"188.80.56.31","custom_attributes":{"average_monthly_spend":1500.0},"last_seen_user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36","last_request_at":1511349783,"unsubscribed_from_emails":false}

Running the same setting the email to null sends the following payload:

"params":{"id":"5a045c938b874d2a82e7413a","user_id":"notyomama","avatar":{"type":"avatar"},"signed_up_at":1511349783,"last_seen_ip":"188.80.56.31","custom_attributes":{"average_monthly_spend":1500.0},"last_seen_user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36","last_request_at":1511349783,"unsubscribed_from_emails":false}

That's odd, because using curl for the same user but just changing the created_at, sends a lot less params:

"params":{"id":"5a045c938b874d2a82e7413a","created_at":1234567891,"user":{"id":"5a045c938b874d2a82e7413a","created_at":1234567891}}

Figuring out where these params are being created, and validating my suspicion that the way we are creating the JSON payload is ignoring null values. I'll investigate.

[kmossco]

Investigated this alongside @thewheat and this isn't a trivial fix as we will have to refactor how we create the JSON payload sent to the endpoints. Postponing a fix until we get other more impactful changes out.