When you are working on applications which will be used by customers, you can use the Azure Active Directory to take care of sign-in and access management. This can help you to focus on the business functionality of your application and Azure will take care of access management.

Azure AD B2C can be used for this purpose. In next few blogs, we will see how to create Azure AD B2C tenant and will try to use it for authenticating your web applications and web APIs.

We already have created Azure AD B2C tenant and have registered the application in B2C tenant. In this article, let’s try to understand what are user flows and why do we need them.

What are user flows ?

Azure AD B2C service can be extended using extensible policy framework. These policies describe identity experiences such as sign up, or sign-in or profile editing.

To setup these experiences for your applications, Azure AD B2C comes with predefined, configurable policies. These predefined configurable policies are called as user flows.

What can be controlled ?

A user flow enables you to control behaviors in your applications by configuring the following settings:

• Account types used for sign-in, such as social accounts like a Facebook or local accounts
• Attributes to be collected from the consumer, such as first name, postal code, and shoe size
• Azure Multi-Factor Authentication
• Customization of the user interface
• Information that the application receives as claims in a token

You can configure many user flows and you can use them in your applications as desired. You can also reuse the user flows across different applications. This flexibility enables you to define and modify identity experiences with minimal or no code changes in your applications.

Recommended user flows

Azure team keeps adding new version of user flows all the time. It is recommended for you to use the tested user flows. When you create a new user flow, you choose the user flow that you need from the  Recommended  tab.

The below user flows are recommended for any application:

Sign up and sign in

This is a single user flow. It is recommended to use this workflow over sign-up user flow or sign-in user flow

This user flow controls the sign up and sign in experiences with single configurations.

Profile editing

This user flow enables user to edit their profile/account information.

Password reset

This user flow enables you to configure whether and how users can reset their passwords.

I hope this article helps you to understand basic terms in user flows. Let me know your thoughts.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know your thoughts.