Question

errAnonDistincIdNonGUIDForm

  • 13 October 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 147 views
L

We have a curious problem where it’s low enough to indicate that most cases work fine, but high enough to indicate a pattern of point of failure.
About 10% of our user accounts in Mixpanel experienced errAnonDistincIdNonGUIDForm failure, with failure description $anon_distinct_id (IDNUMBER) didn’t match expected GUID pattern, upon new user creation/alias creation/setting user properties for the first time. 

Can someone please elaborate what could be the culprit of this error? We’re not getting very far with low level customer support as the only thing that’s being suggested that we’re not following proper initialization but we’re following the process laid out in the dev docs to a tee.

Step 1. Mixpanel initializes with our token

Step 2. Calling Mixpanel.mainInstance().identify(distincId: userId, usePeople: true)

Step 3.  Calling Mixpanel.mainInstance().createAlias(userId, distinctId: Mixpanel.mainInstance.distinctId)

Step 4. Setting user attributes and properties. 

 

We can deduce the point of failure is somewhere between steps 2 and 4 because the user account gets created but none of the user attributes (using Mixpanel.mainInstance().people.set method) actually get set.

 

 

 

1 reply

cherise
Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Hi @LilyS 

About 10% of our user accounts in Mixpanel experienced errAnonDistincIdNonGUIDForm failure, with failure description $anon_distinct_id (IDNUMBER) didn’t match expected GUID pattern, upon new user creation/alias creation/setting user properties for the first time. 

Can you explain where you are seeing this error? Is it in Mixpanel, or in your debugging logs?

 

...we’re following the process laid out in the dev docs to a tee

Step 1. Mixpanel initializes with our token

Step 2. Calling Mixpanel.mainInstance().identify(distincId: userId, usePeople: true)

Step 3.  Calling Mixpanel.mainInstance().createAlias(userId, distinctId: Mixpanel.mainInstance.distinctId)

Step 4. Setting user attributes and properties. 

Are you using the old ID management system or ID Merge? 

It looks like you may be identifying your users before calling Alias.  As a general rule, you only want to call Alias once. The primary purpose of calling mixpanel.alias() is to connect a user’s anonymous events from before a signup (or other identification) event with the post-signup activity on your site or in your app.

We can deduce the point of failure is somewhere between steps 2 and 4 because the user account gets created but none of the user attributes (using Mixpanel.mainInstance().people.set method) actually get set.

This is an issue that our new ID management system,  ID Merge, aims to resolve. It is likely that the user profile is getting created under a different ID than the future properties that are getting sent. This could be due to aliasing second, but it is also something that I would recommend ID Merge to help resolve.

 

 

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