Metadata Best Practices

Avoid periods, ellipses, and dynamic metadata field names.
Metadata field names must not contain a dot. For example, use of the following field name would return a Bad Request (400) error:
{ "preference.color": "pink" }
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One way of handling this limitation is to nest attributes:
{ "preference": { "color": "pink" } }
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Alternately, you can use any delimiter that is not . or $. However, you can the . delimiter in the data values such as in the below example:
{ "preference": "light.blue" }
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Do not use dynamic field names. For example, instead of using the following structure:

"participants": {
    "Alice" : {
        "role": "sender"
    },
    "Bob" : {
        "role": "receiver"
    }
}

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Use this:

"participants": [
    {
        "name": "Alice",
        "role": "sender"
    },
    {
        "name" : "Bob",
        "role": "receiver"
    }
]

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Use a consistent data type each time you create or update a given metadata field. For example, if you use user.user_metadata.age = "23" for one user and user.user_metadata.age = 23 for another user, it will cause issues when retrieving the data.

Both app_metadata and user_metadata are together limited to a size of 16 MB total. Metadata storage is not designed to be a general purpose data store, and you should still use your own external storage facility when possible. When using Rules and/or the Management Dashboard, your metadata limits may be lower.
When setting the user_metadata field using the Authentication API's Signup endpoint, you are limited to a maximum of 10 String fields and 500 characters. For an example of working with metadata during a custom signup process, see Custom Signup > Using the API.

Store any information that you want use to customize Auth0 emails in metadata and preferably user_metadata if the user is allowed to change it, such as information used to determine the language for an email.

User credentials such as Access Tokens, Refresh Tokens, and additional passwords should not be stored in app_metadata, as these will be visible to any Auth0 Dashboard administrator.

The app_metadata field should not contain any of these properties:

__tenant
_id
blocked
clientID
created_at
email_verified
email
globalClientID
global_client_id
identities
lastIP
lastLogin
loginsCount
metadata
multifactor_last_modified
multifactor
updated_at
user_id

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