Add an API-endpoint to set the user home location

[pietervdvn]

Description

Hi,

While a third-party application can currently read the user home location, it can not currently set the home location. Setting the home location is hidden away in the settings - as a result very little people use this feature.

By providing an API-endpoint, other applications would be able to set this and provide a better experience for all.

Screenshots

No response

[tomhughes]

What sort of application would (reasonably) want to do that though? We don't allow any other user details to be set via the API so what makes the location special?

[pietervdvn]

I'm asking this as dev from MapComplete. I do show a home icon and 'zoom to home location' button.

However, I'd also love to set it via the same application without sending them to a different gui.
And other settings might be intersting to set too, e.g. the profile.

[tordans]

I just ran into this general issue. We want to give users a quick way to add a user description to their profile.

What sort of application would (reasonably) want to do that though?

Our use case is: We have an app about bike infrastructure and show OSM notes and allow to add OSM notes via the app. The feedback from the OSM community is, that users of our app do not provide enough context on who they are. The main issue is the empty user profile description.

So what we wanted to do: Check if the our user – who is logged into osm via oAuth2 – has a profile description. If the description is empty, we wanted to show a form with a suggestion on what to write. Something like "This account is managed by department X of Y in the context of the bicycle infrastructure project at URL Z."

To make sure our users actually add this data to their OSM profile and make the whole UX as nice as possible, we would want to write the profile description via API.

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If such an API gets green light @tomhughes I would look into adding the API endpoints to do so (which should have similarities to #4605).