Identity Management

User Logins and Management

Canonic has a uniquie type of user table that lets you manage & store your users data along with the capabilities of suppporting different login providers. We support GITHUB, GOOGLE & FACEBOOK as of now.

When you create an identity type table in your new or existing project, it'll come with a bunch of predefined system fields that covers most of the user information. You can also add more fields to this table as you require.

You can choose and enable which login provider you want your backend to support and fill in the required details for them.

• Client ID → The Client ID of the project issued from login provider.
• Secret → The Secret key of the project issued from login provider.
• Callback URI → The URL of the application where you want your users will be redirected after logging in.

Once you fill in the required paramaters, you are set to go and hit deploy. Canonic will spit out a unified set of API's (along with it's documentation) for login, authentication and managing your users inrespective of from which source they are loging in.

How to handle User Logins

There are two main flows typically that come up for handling user logins:

• Signing up a new User
• Authenticating returning user

I - Signing Up a new User

Step 1: Fetch Redirect URL

After providing the option to Signup or Login through the providers in your frontend, you need to redirect the user to their specific login urls. You can get them by calling the getLoginUrlsForUser API.

Example Query:

query Login {
  getLoginUrlsForUser {
    GOOGLE
    GITHUB
    FACEBOOK
  }
}

Step 2: Logging the User

When the user completes the signup or login, the provider will redirect the your app to the Callback URL (that you added in your identity table settings) along with a token appended to it.

Call the loginForUser API and pass the retreived token from service provider along with the type of the provider. It'll get the users details passed by the provider, store it and send them back to you. It'll also send you an auth token to authenticate the user without making him to login again the next time.

Example Mutation:

mutation Login($code: String!, $service: String!) {
  loginForUser(code: $code, service: $service) {
    token
    user {
      email
      firstName
      lastName
      avatar {
        url
      }
    }
  }
}

II - Authenticate returning User

Send the stored auth token to the authForUser API to authenticate the user and let him in. It'll return a valid token which you can replace with your existing one along with the user's details.

Example Mutation:

mutation Login($token: String!) {
  authForUser(token: $token) {
    token
    user {
      email
      firstName
      lastName
      avatar {
        url
      }
    }
  }
}

The API can also return an error saying invalid_token or token expired. In that case, you'll need to redirect the user to the respective providers and log him again. To do that, just repeat the signup flow mentioned above, canonic will take care of the rest.

That's all you need to do to manage user logins and signups. It cuts down all the boiler plate code, sets up different logins in a few easy steps and manages your users data in a secure way.

Canonic also gives you all the CRUD APIs for your user identity table in case you need to build any other flows according to youe product needs.

User Table CRUD APIs