Came across your “Get Logged-In User Info” clonable. Simply amazing!
I’m so close to using (or probably abusing) webflows membership function to store user-specific application data. TLDR it’s possible to save strings of around 50K characters in the custom plain text fields, which makes it suitable to store all kinds of data in json form. Thanks to your work I can load and process this data without a hitch. One small issue remains: Is it possible to update user data outside of the user account form?
I thought about reverse engineering the post call that is created when you udapte user data on the user account page, but there has to be another way…
Unfortunately, it’s prohibited to place user account forms outside the user account page. If there was a way to work around that, just placing the form, hiding it from the user and updating it using custom code would also be feasible.
Does anyone have ideas and suggestions about how to make it work?
There are only two ways to update custom user info-
On the user account page
Through the Webflow API, which requires a middle tier, like serverless Netlify functions, or Make.com webhook automations
If you dig through the UserInfo library repo, you’ll see that we’re actually pulling a sneaky trick to retrieve the custom user fields. We create an IFRAME dynamically, pull the user-account page, wait for it to load (tricky, and hacky), and the pull the data.
In theory, you could reverse that, however it’s a lot of work and a fragile process. It’s reliable enough for loading data, but I’d be concerned about relying on it to persist that data. I think I’d go the webflow API route.
Likewise, our JSON feature storage feature is something we’re developing on AWS, however it will be awhile before we can offer it as a service. We need to get the efficiency and performance perfect to keep the costs as low as possible. But when we get there, it will offer a nice script-based API for getting and setting user data dynamically from anywhere in your site.
Since I’m using it for a “walking skeleton”, I thought going the hacky route should be fine and actually already implemented something very close to the iframe workaround you mentioned (before reading your message. Nice to know I’m not the only one coming up with hacks like that!).
Great to hear you’re working on a more stable solution. I might switch to it later, if the walking skeleton proves my hypotheses.