I am confused as to why we can only discover a User using the following criteria: username, last_name, first_name, email, or _socialidentity.facebook.id , but we can search for entities using any of the fields in the Entity. Why are user look-ups more restrictive than queries?

Hey,



User Lookup is just a limited variation of user querying, where the rules are enforced on the server side instead of the client. This allows your app to save private information with each user, but still supports discovery of who else is using the app. If your use case does not require storing any private or sensitive information, than just stick with the much more flexible (and exposing) user query api!

Thanks for the feedback Ed! Is there a way to use queries to look up users? I thought the [userLookUp](http://devcenter.kinvey.com/java/guides/users#lookup "userLookUp") method was the only way .

Hey-- the User class contains a `retrieveBlocking(...)` that takes a query as a parameter, you can use that to retrieve a set of user objects:



http://devcenter.kinvey.com/android/reference/api/java/reference/com/kinvey/java/User.html#retrieveBlocking(com.kinvey.java.Query)