Duplicate Records & Third-Party Apps

This article pertains to: Legacy API (V1) Inform (v2)

Many apps and devices, such as Fitbit, Apple Health, and Apple Watch, allow users to link additional apps in order to track their activity.

These apps often capture the user's activity (steps, workouts, sleep, etc.) and publish them to the app that the user has synced to their Validic user (i.e. Fitbit or Apple Health).

Sometimes, this can result in what appears to be duplicate data records. When this happens you may see what appears to be the same record appear in the Validic API multiple times.

The general cause of this is that the third-party app is repeatedly sending the record to the vendor and then deleting it. When that record arrives in the vendor source, it is then sent to Validic so we write the record in the API.

The challenge here is that the vendor sources do not notify Validic via their APIs about deleted records so the records that the third-party app removed will remain in the Validic API.

If you see this behavior, it is recommended that you confirm what extra apps the user might be using and encourage them to only use the source vendor that is synced to their Validic user.