Customers in your business do different actions which are called events, and by tracking them you gain insights vital for developing the perfect business. All events are customer-centric so every time an event is tracked, it is assigned to an existing customer or a new one is created. This is done after the identification of the customer by ID.

ID transformations can be applied to both tracking and imports. All IDs tracked in realtime can be set to automatically undergo the chosen transformation but you can apply the same to the list of IDs that you import into your project. Find more information about tracking in the [Web tracking article](🔗) and about imports in the [Imports article](🔗).
# Customers' IDs transformation
In Bloomreach Engagement you can create multiple hard / soft IDs for customers and for each of them you can enable or disable the predefined transformations:
Trim
Lowercase

Always reach an agreement in your teams before enabling/disabling transformations as it can have serious impact on the consistency of your data.
## Why enabling the trim or lowercase transformation?
**Imagine that you tracked events from 2 emails:** [email protected] and [email protected] seems to be 1 unique customer with some issue in your tracking (or for example inconsistency of the customer's data between your CRM and your e-commerce platform). Without lowercasing ID on Bloomreach Engagement's input side, these events would be assigned to 2 different customers, which will deteriorate the quality of your data in Bloomreach Engagement. On the other hand, **with lowercasing enabled, this will be properly tracked to 1 unique customer** in Bloomreach Engagement.

## Trim ID transformation
**Trim transformation removes all whitespaces in the beginning or end of string**. Trim transformation is mandatory for every new project created in Bloomreach Engagement. You can choose if you want to enable trim transformation for a project created before this feature was released on 17 Dec 2018.

Please note that trim transformation cannot be disabled after it has already been enabled.

Examples
INPUT VALUES | Column Title | AFTER TRANSFORMATION |
"Â Â Â Â [email protected]" | > | "[email protected]" |
"[email protected] " | > | "[email protected]" |
"em  [email protected]" | > | "em  [email protected]" |
" 15er89g7s9+gs4f65sd768 " | > | "15er89g7s9+gs4f65sd768" |
## Lowercase ID transformation
Lowercase transformation lowercase all characters. It is optional but we strongly recommend not to switch it on and off again as it can cause serious inconsistencies in your tracked data (as it is described in the picture above).
# Enabling and disabling transformations
## For new projects
**Trim transformation** is mandatory and it is enabled by default (cannot be disabled). **Lowercase transformation** can be enabled or disabled. Your decision should depend on whether you want your customers to use case sensitive emails or not. This setting can be changed in the future only with the assistance of an Bloomreach Engagement administrator.
## For existing projects
**Trim transformation** and **Lowercase transformation** are not enabled for projects that had been created before the ID transformation feature was released on 17 Dec 2018. If you need to turn it on you will need the assistance of an Bloomreach Engagement administrator.
Please note that enabling transformations only affects data that will flow to your project after this change. You will need to re-import already existing data to trim / lowercase it.