institution_id field in link create deprecated?

[AZielinsky95]

I used to be able to pass in institution_id to my create link flow and skip the institution selection step making the flow a much better UX for users trying to reconnect a disconnected institution. It's now throwing INVALID_INSTITUION_ID despite getInstitutionByID saying it's valid. I do notice the field in the docs is marked as a legacy. Has this use-case been deprecated? I'd be surprised if so as it seems super useful. Is there a new way of pre-selecting institution by id or is that field still supposed to be functional?

[phoenixy1]

Thanks for the question! The feature you're referring to is called Modular Link. It was only ever supported in Europe, and it has recently been deprecated in Europe due to low adoption and improvements to the regular Link flow that should make it unnecessary. For reconnecting a disconnected institution, you should use Update Mode, which will automatically skip the institution selection step and does not require passing the institution_id.

[AZielinsky95]

Thanks for getting back to me. I probably just tested this previously in sandbox mode where I believe it used to work. So my use case is a user can revoke their access token / disconnect their connection but still keep their data in the app. I wanted to launch link for that specific institution if they ever wanted to re-establish a connection. When there's no more access token / item I don't believe I can launch in update mode. Is there anything I can do for my use case?

[phoenixy1]

It's a little difficult to answer your question without knowing more about your use case (like which products you're using), but in general we don't recommend creating UIs that encourage users to disconnect and re-connect their bank accounts because it is a lot of friction for them and our API is not designed around that behavior model. Depending on which products you're using, it can also increase Plaid API costs and latency. If doing so is simply a supported but non-mainline flow in your app, I would recommend just having the user take the extra step to re-select their FI.

[AZielinsky95]

So I'm just using the Transactions product. It's definitely not an encouraged flow but just a convenient one - A user should be able to remove a connection. If they do, we offer to keep their data and just remove the plaid link. If they ever want to reconnect that link in the future, I wanted to allow them to do so by directly taking them to that institution in link flow. Sounds like there's no way to make that work and so they will have to explicitly search for that institution. Interesting that this use case isn't demanded enough to warrant that extra parameter when opening link.