Understanding Password Reset in Bubble Apps
What exactly happens with a Bubble app when a password is forgotten? In the previous tutorial I demonstrated how to create a login form like this that has a forgotten my password button, shrinks the form down just to the email address and then when an email address is entered and send password reset email is clicked we run this workflow here.
The Magic of Password Reset Emails
Step one is perhaps where the magic happens that generates an email and the email is sent using the email settings that you set up through here. If you don't have a domain linked to your Bubble app, so you're still on the free plan for example, you can still send emails through your Bubble app. These emails known as transactional emails, transactional emails are different to mass or bulk emails, a transactional email is 99% of the time triggered by an action taken by a user and it is sent to one user rather than a group of users and you can still send transactional emails through Bubble but they kind of go out through like a pooled service and they don't appear as if you are the sender it's more of a generic Bubble identity.
Setting Up Transactional Email Providers
It's suitable for testing but when you send your app live or you've got users testing it you really do want to set up your own domain and then set up the transactional email provider that Bubble provides, gives you details for here because that's going to increase the chance that your emails are delivered reliably and decrease the chance that they end up in spam. So that's what happens at this step here. Now if you do have your own transactional email provider say you set up your own API integration or you're using a plugin for another service like Postmark then you can tick the button here and then it just generates the token and you can retrieve that token by referring back to step one and inserting it as dynamic data into a plugins action workflow if you've got that API or that plugin set up.
The Password Reset Process
But as it is here this email will be sent to your user and they'll receive a link and if we look in the Bubble documentation you can see that the link is to a page on your site reset_ password and the link contains a parameter here of reset equals and then this is the unique ID that gives the user permission to reset the password so it's single use it's completely unique and so the user will click on that link and they'll go through to your reset_password page and I think that it's likely all too common that lots of people launch their Bubble apps without bothering to style this page and as you can see if you don't style it you end up with a lot of the default Bubble UI elements so you'll want to restart this page but let's have a look at what happens when the user arrives they click a button and then there's a workflow action of reset_password and it refers to two fields and that then resets the user's password you might want to also add on to here just a suggestion of a step to direct them to the the main area of your website otherwise they could end up stuck on this page.
Using Custom Transactional Email Providers
So if you are using your own transactional email provider we go back into login demo and you have generated your token you'll need to construct this URL and so the way to do that would be in dynamic data if I express it in here obviously you wouldn't be putting in here because you're not using this isn't sent if you tick this box but just so I can display some dynamic data you can go for home and then we copy and we reconstruct this address and then here is where you would refer back to your step one and put the token in and that way you can still present your user with the one-time link to reset their password without having to use the default transactional email provider that Bubble lets you set up in settings my personal favorite is Postmark and there'll definitely be a video coming out soon of how to set up your own custom integration in with Postmark and understand their layouts and their templates because it's really reliable they've got a fantastic dashboard and once you understand how to do the API connection you can really quickly have some fantastic looking templates for all of the ones you expect like your password reset like welcome you get the picture so watch out for those videos in the future.