Passwords with Flows

This guide will walk you through integrating Password-based authentication into your Descope Flows. Passwords are pretty self explanatory, but there are important aspects to how to manage their use in the flow screens and with flow actions.

Flow Actions

When using Passwords, you have the standard actions for most authentication methods available.

• Sign Up / Password - Signs the user up, but will not work if user already exists
• Sign In / Password - Signs the user in, but if the user doesn't exist it will fail.
• Update Password - Will add a password, onto an existing user's identity for login capabilities.
• Replace Password - Will allow a user to update their current password, using their existing password.
• Send Password Reset - Will send a password reset email to the user, after typing in their email address.

How to Use OAuth Actions

Most of these actions are pretty simple, and you can drop them in your application like any other Action.

This is an example of using the Sign Up or In action in a flow:

Flow Screens

When using Passwords, there are a few different screen components you can choose to use in your flow.

Email / Phone vs. Username

When using Passwords, it's common to use a username instead of a phone or email address as the unique login ID of the user. In that case, you'll want to make sure you use the Custom Login ID component, instead of the Email or Phone component in your flow to sign the user in and up. This is so that you can create any username you want, without it having to be a sanitized as an email address or phone number.

You can just rename the component to Username, and whatever is used in that field will be what the sign up or sign in actions afterwards rely upon to identify the user in question.

Entering Passwords in Screens

There are two main components for entering a password.

• Login Password - You use this component for your sign in screens. This will not work with new users and the sign up actions.
• New Password - You use this component for your sign up screens. This will not work with existing users and the sign in actions.

The New Password component has some additional features as well, designed to help sign the user up more securely.

Password Confirmation

You can require a re-confirmation of the entered password with this feature enabled.

Policy Previewer

You can have your users preview the password policy you set for them under Authentication Methods -> Passwords, as they are typing their own new password.

Error Handling

Error handling is handled like any other action. You can refer to our Flow Error Handling guide for more details.