No login required – how does ftrack connect know who I am?

[ftracker-Isa]

Ftrack Connect launches and immediately says I lack permissions.  It did not ask me to login with my ftrack account. 

Without logging in it knows my company
Yet the link knows what company I am connecting with.
This seems improperly insecure.  I should be logging in to ftrack here.  Are you using my browser?  I logged out of ftrack in the browser.  Nope, it knows what company.  How?  It should not know.  I am a freelancer.  What if three of my clients want to use ftrack and ftrack connect?  I should be logging in to each one of them explicitly.

And who am I?
The first time launch warning knows my company.  I assume it knows who I am, but it does not acknowledge me by name.  Once it knows my company and who I am, the FIRST feedback should be to acknowledge me and my company by name.

This is, IMO, a NRFFR issue *not ready for full release

[ftracker-Isa]

It is COOL that ftrack knows something without my logging in.  So if you want to keep this, err, feature, please confirm who I am and what company ftrack (if I have multiple).  I believe I signed up for a trial account so I thought I had two user identities.  In that case it should let me know 

connecting as user at company
Or connect as
     user B at companyB
     user C at companyC

 

[ftracker-Isa]

Apparently when I tested Connect 1.0 I logged in then and the APp knows who I am now.  Still raises the issue of being a freelancer working with multiple ftrack clients

 

[Andrew Lawrence]

Hi Isa, 

Thanks for reporting this, the team have reached out to you on a separate thread to address all of your raised issues, however just posting here for visibility on the community.

In this instance, regarding how ftrack connect stores it's sessions I'd be happy to explain how we do this:

When you log into your ftrack site via the browser (e.g mysite.ftrackapp.com), this creates a sessions that is stored is stored in your browsers cookies. This enables you to remain logged in when browsing the ftrack site, until you either log out or that session is cleared. However, ftrack Connect being a desktop based application handles authentication slightly differently, when you open ftrack Connect for the first time it will ask for your site URL, at which point it directs you to your ftrack site. If you're already logged in via the browser, it will successfully authenticate as your logged in user, or if you aren't logged in via the browser it will ask you to log in, and then it will authenticate.

The important thing to note here is that after you've completed this authentication in the browser, the session in ftrack Connect is not related to your browser session (thats why when you logged out of the browser, ftrack Connect remembers your session). This is because ftrack Connect stores your authentication as an API connection in the config.json file which can be found at (if you're on a Mac)

/Users/username/Library/Application Support/ftrack-connect

You'll notice that if you blow away that config.json file and then re-launch ftrack Connect, it will ask you to re-authenticate. 

I realise this isn't an ideal workflow if you are using ftrack Connect to access multiple different ftrack sites, ideally we'd have a way to store connections to multiple ftrack servers that you can swap between without re-authenticating, however if you do need to connect to multiple ftrack sites you can use the *Log Out & Quit* option to close ftrack Connect and clear the session, allowing to log back in to a different site.
 

I hope this helps to clarify, if you have any further questions don't hesitate to give us a shout. 

Cheers,
Andrew

[Frank Rueter]

I just hit the same question as I am testing Connect the first time. Wouldn't it be easy enough to store multiple config.json files in case of users needing to access multiple sites?

I.e. have a button in the UI to "switch user/site" then generate additional configs. In case there are more than one config on disk have a menu to choose which one to use on session open, otherwise behave as-is.

Just a first impression thought as I am very new to frack.

Cheers,

frank

[Andrew Lawrence]

Hi @Frank Rueter, thanks for the update there.

You're absolutely right, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement separate configs for different sites, however it isn't something that we've had request all too often. We know there are studios out there who use multiple ftrack sites, or even remote artists or freelancers who may connect to different sites at once and have the option to easily switch between those would be great. 

We'll make sure to get this logged on our end with the product team. Thanks for the excellent suggestions here. 

Cheers,
Andrew