It's always important to know who is giving you feedback. Are they a paying customer, a lead, or just some random person on the internet? This information helps you prioritize accordingly.

That's why Canny has its own user accounts. If a user isn't identified in your application, we'll ask them to sign up for a free Canny user account.

However, you might want to disable this functionality to force Canny to always use your app's user accounts.

It's slightly more work but can provide better context to your team and a better experience for your users.

Prerequisites ⚠️

Your application has user accounts
Your server is set up to generate single sign-on tokens

Instructions

Instead of asking users to sign up for a free Canny user profile, we'll send them to your website to log in to your application. Once they're logged in, you send a request to your server to generate a single sign-on token for them, and then redirect them back to Canny.

Make a login redirect page on your website
This could be your normal login page or a custom single sign-on page. This is the page where we will send your users to log in.
Add a form to let the user log in to their account
If the user is already logged in, you can skip this step.
Send a request to your server to generate a single sign-on token
Once the user is logged in, fetch an SSO token to authenticate them in Canny.
Redirect them back to Canny
When we send users to your website, we'll include a redirect query parameter. This tells you where to send users after they've been logged in. (See below)

After building this page, add its URL in your admin settings. Use our tool to test that the redirect works, and then push it live to your users.

Snippet

The following JavaScript snippet will achieve step 4. You will have to write the part that requests the single sign-on token from your server.

function getQueryParameterByName(name) {
  var pairStrings = window.location.search.slice(1).split('&');
  var pairs = pairStrings.map(function(pair) {
    return pair.split('=');
  });
  return pairs.reduce(function(value, pair) {
    if (value) return value;
    return pair[0] === name ? decodeURIComponent(pair[1]) : null;
  }, null);
}

function getRedirectURL(ssoToken) {
  var redirectURL = getQueryParameterByName('redirect');
  var companyID = getQueryParameterByName('companyID');
  if (redirectURL.indexOf('https://') !== 0 || !companyID) {
    return null;
  }

  return 'https://canny.io/api/redirects/sso?companyID=' + companyID + '&ssoToken=' + ssoToken + '&redirect=' + redirectURL;
}

var redirectURL = getRedirectURL(ssoToken);
if (redirectURL) {
  window.location.assign(redirectURL);
}

If you have any questions or issues while setting this up, don't hesitate to reach out.

Prerequisites ⚠️

Instructions

Snippet

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