Backend: Inviting Users through username or email

[manjitapandey]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I should be able to invite users through emails. This feature should be added to manage project page by clicking on invite users. The new users will be invited adding username or email.

Additional context The backend task to invite user should be created.

[spwoodcock]

This is tricky as we don't use emails for login, we use OSM credentials. OSM does not provide the email address of the user from their API.

Two options I can think of:

Via OSM Message

Verify user exists

• Manager enters the OSM username of an existing user (+role they will join as).
• Code makes a HEAD request to https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/USERNAMEHERE/.
• If response 200, the user exists. If response 404 the user does not exist.

Invite

• Manager clicks to invite user.
• Send message to user with invite link:
  • We get the https://www.openstreetmap.org/message/new/USERNAMEHERE webpage.
  • Manipulate the page to insert text into the fields with names message[title] and message[body].
  • Insert a link to the related FMTM project page.
  • Automate clicking the button named commit.
  • This sends the message to the user.
• We also make an entry in our database for the user, along with the user_role entry linking them to a project with a role.
  • As we don't know the OSM user ID yet, we can insert the next negative value in the sequence for the id column.

EDIT this approach will not work due to cross site scripting restrictions, duh! The only way would be via an API, which OSM is in the process of implementing.

Notification

• The user logs into OSM and sees they have a notification, with a link to the project page.
• This link will open FMTM, where they must login via OSM (in reality they are already logged in, so just need to click the prompt to accept linking FMTM app to their profile).
• We add logic to the /me/ endpoint: if the username matches an existing user and the user id is negative, then update to the correct user id in the table.

Caveats

• It is possible to get the OSM username from the user ID: https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/user/20386219
• There is no way I can find to get the user ID from username.
• If we could do this, we would insert the OSM ID directly into the database.

Via Email

Note this requires adding an email service to FMTM, which we don't have currently, but will probably add.

Invite

• Manager enters email of user they wish to invite (+role they will join as) and submits.
• Email sent to user with a link.

Email

• User clicks link and is directed to FMTM, where they must log in first (we must store the page they navigated from).
• Once logged in, the user entry is made, and the user is redirected back to the page they tried to access (from the saved variable above).
• This endpoint accepts the invite, and does other logic to give the user the correct role for a project etc...

I added this to the agenda for our next meeting to discuss.

[spwoodcock]

Looking into it, I think sending a message via OSM also notifies the user via email!

So that could be the perfect solution - as long as the user has their email up to date in openstreemap 😄

The emails look like this:

[spwoodcock]

Also of note, there is a proposal to make a proper API for OSM messages: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Messaging_API_proposal

[spwoodcock]

Blocked by #1192

We won't go ahead with the idea above as it's very OSM-centric. We need more flexibility.

[spwoodcock]

Reconsidered this after updates and team calls!

• We don't want to necessarily use OSM for mapping, but I think we should still enforce OSM for project managers (i.e. on the project management dashboard).
• The project management dashboard is where messages to users will likely be sent, so we can implement the first approach, using OSM messages.
• There is a recent PR under review to get the Messages API into OSM API 0.6 soon 👍

[spwoodcock]

Unblocked by Messages API finally being merged!

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/4509