Well in JSR 168 the username *is* the ID. That said if you use the userModule you could get the JBoss Portal User object and there is a getId() method on it that returns an object. In the case of the DB implementation it would return the table id (I guess that's the id you are talking about) in LDAP it would return the username. If you want to be safe, i suggest you use the username. 1) You can do it in a JSR168 compliant way 2) You are not dependant on the implementation of user module (LDAP or Database or whatever) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4034931#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...