Email Authentication
In addition to providing full authentication capabilities, <form.io> also provides a very robust method for Automatic Logins via Email. There are many use cases where Email Login is utilized including, but not limited to…
- Email Registrations (where they must click on a link in their email to register)
- Email Reset Password
To make this happen, there is a special token that can be added to the message of your email action and templates. This token will generate a special JWT token to log in the person who the email was addressed to. This token is defined as follows.
[[token(data.email=user)]]
Which is defined as follows…
[[token(LOOKUP_FIELD=LOOKUP_RESOURCE)]]
- LOOKUP_FIELD - This is the field that is used to search for the record we wish to login. This works by taking the value provided in the Email To: Address and searching the resource with that value as that field.
- LOOKUP_RESOURCE - This is the resource to lookup when establishing the token.
Important Note - This will ONLY create a token if the persons email address that is being sent the email is found within the resource.
For example, lets say you have a Resource as Customer and a field within that resource called Email you wish to create a token for. Now lets say you wish to send an email to one of your customers to complete their registration via email. This may look like the following.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Register Now
Message: Click here to complete your registration http://myapp.com/?token=[[token(data.email=customer)]]#register
This following email performs the following:
- Looks up [email protected] within the customer Resource.
- If a record is found, it generates a temporary token and replaces
[[token(data.email=customer)]]with that token. - Tells the application to navigate to the #register state once the authentication has been performed.
This turns this email into something that looks like the following.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Register Now
Message: Click here to complete your registration http://myapp.com/?token=lkjsdlkjs90980982l3kjlkjslkjsd....#register
Once you have the email being sent, this single sign on URL will direct them to the Serverless application which needs to handle the token. This requires a minor change within your application to accept the token and then reset the
localStorage value with the new token. The <form.io> library will then take it from there and authenticate all future requests with that token. You can make this change by adding the following to your /app/config.js file.// Parse query string
var query = {};
location.search.substr(1).split("&").forEach(function(item) {
query[item.split("=")[0]] = item.split("=")[1] && decodeURIComponent(item.split("=")[1]);
});
// This is what you will need to add to your application.
if (query.token) {
localStorage.setItem('formioToken', query.token);
localStorage.removeItem('formioAppUser');
localStorage.removeItem('formioUser');
window.history.pushState("", "", location.pathname + location.hash);
}
Once you have implemented this, your application should then be able to handle an automatic email authentication into your application.
Last modified 1yr ago