LTI Advantage: user identity

[kreut]

Hi,

I'm starting to dig into LTI Advantage and have a question on the big picture flow.  In LTI 1.1, users of my external app would first have to log into my app inside of Canvas so that I could save the Canvas user id and associate it with the user id that I use within my own app.  Then, once the connection was made, on future launches, I could just look up the Canvas user id in my database to see which user it is. 

However, if my external tool uses LTI Advantage, it doesn't seem to be the the same process.  It looks to me, that now the identity of the user is never determined by my app; instead it's determined by Canvas, so that when Canvas passes back the Canvas user id, I should automatically create a user associated with this Canvas user id.  Is this a correct understanding of the new flow?  In other words, do users not even create accounts on my website to start?

Thank you!

[admin43 · Accepted solution]

You could automatically create an account for them, first asking them to set a password in case they would like to directly access your website (or send a reset password email and automatically create one for them). The information needed to create their account should be in the LTI Launch if you required it when configuring your tool (email, first name, last name, role, etc). You would also want to give the user an option to log in to an existing account, in case they already registered with your website. In both cases, once they are authenticated with your website, you would associate the LTI User with their account.

[kreut]

Thanks so much!