Anonymous Access

The REST API with client authentication provides a means to have the portal create and manage workshop sessions on your behalf, but have user authentication handled by a separate system.

If you do not need to have users be authenticated, but still want to provide your own front end from which users select a workshop, such as when integrating workshops into an existing web property, you can enable anonymous mode and redirect users direct to a URL for workshop session creation.

Note that using this is only recommended for temporary deployments and not for a permanent web site providing access to workshops.

Enabling anonymous access

To enable full anonymous access to the training portal, you need to set the registration type to anonymous.

apiVersion: training.educates.dev/v1beta1
kind: TrainingPortal
metadata:
  name: lab-markdown-sample
spec:
  portal:
    registration:
      type: anonymous
  workshops:
  - name: lab-markdown-sample
    capacity: 3
    reserved: 1

Note that users will still be able to visit the training portal directly and view the catalog of available workshops. You therefore shouldn’t link to the main page of the training portal. Instead you need to link from your custom index page, to the individual links for creating each workshop.

Triggering workshop creation

To trigger creation and allocation of a workshop to a user, you need to direct users browsers to a URL specific to the workshop. The form of this URL should be:

https://lab-markdown-sample-ui.test/workshops/environment/<name>/create/?index_url=<index>

The value <name> should be replaced with the name of the workshop environment corresponding to the workshop which needs to be created.

The value <index> should be replaced with the URL for your custom index page where you list the workshops available. When the workshop is completed by a user, they will be redirected back to this index page. They will also be redirected back to this index page when an error occurs.

When a user is redirected back to the index page, a query string parameter will be supplied to notify of the reason the user is being returned. This can be used to display a banner or other indication as to why they were returned.

The name of the query string parameter is notification and the possible values are:

• session-deleted - Used when the workshop session was completed or restarted.

• workshop-invalid - Used when the name of the workshop environment supplied when attempting to create the workshop was invalid.

• session-unavailable - Used when capacity has been reached and a workshop session cannot be created.

• session-invalid - Used when an attempt is made to access a session which doesn’t exist. This can occur when the workshop dashboard is refreshed sometime after the workshop session had expired and been deleted.

• startup-timeout - Used when a startup timeout was specified for a workshop and it didn’t start within the required time.