How do you get the association_id from the CC data dump?

Question

I am working with Stack Exchange /users/ data and trying to get a user's "united" profile, to see what sites they're active in other than the queried site. As an example: http://stackexchange.com/users/7dee0fe4-9eac-40f4-8521-89ce6916bd66?tab=accounts shows all the active sites for Jeremy Banks. Each user has an "ID" number that is specific to that site, and the same User ID on a different site corresponds to a different user. How do I get that unique user hash (association_id, here, "7dee0fe4-9eac-40f4-8521-89ce6916bd66") from the user data?

I see the users/{id}/associated method, for API use. It requires the "association_id," which doesn't always appear in the list of values returned by /users/{ids} and is not in the users.xml file in the data dump.

Where do I find it, or how do I make it?

Answer 1

association_id appears in the returns of /users/{ids} for user's who have existing associations.

For example:

... more ... "
up_vote_count": 871,
"down_vote_count": 48,
"accept_rate": 82,
"association_id": "f403b833-81b1-421c-96e6-ede6e9efb3c4",
"user_questions_url": "/users/80572/questions",
"user_answers_url": "/users/80572/answers",
"user_favorites_url": "/users/80572/favorites",
... more ...

While it is possible for a user to have a Stack Exchange network profile independent of associations, this ability did not exist at the time of the 1.0 API release (when the /users/{id} method was added) and as such isn't really exposed natively yet.

With regards to the CC data dump, we don't include association_id as it hasn't been very stable historically.