WebAuthN with SPA: allow customized form submission

[zepatrik]

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• [X] I could not find a solution in the existing issues, docs, nor discussions.
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Describe your problem

Especially with flutter which is canvas/webassembly based, it is very hard/impossible to implement webauthn (ask @sashatalalasha). One can as a workaround render a non-visible form that the /.well-known/webauthn.js script can pick up and use for processing, but on form submit the browser navigates away from the SPA.

Describe your ideal solution

Instead of using form.submit(), which does not emit a submit event but instead straight away submits the form, we could use form.requestSubmit().

The obvious question is: Why does this method exist, when we've had the submit() method since the dawn of time?

The answer is simple. submit() submits the form, but that's all it does. requestSubmit(), on the other hand, acts as if a submit button were clicked. The form's content is validated, and the form is submitted only if validation succeeds. Once the form has been submitted, the submit event is sent back to the form object.

The code in question is: https://github.com/ory/kratos/blob/a11841399956963bab319ce233a64ccb295d9b1d/selfservice/strategy/webauthn/js/webauthn.js#L87

Workarounds or alternatives

Allow customizing the behavior of the script by defining callbacks.

Version

latest

Additional Context

No response

[alantbarlow]

If this would solve the issues you were having with implementing webauthn with flutter then I'm all for it. I too wanted to use webauthn as my primary login/sign-up method while utilizing flutter for the UI.

This solution seems easy to implement, do you guys have any thoughts on this?

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