Just one gateway login to open multiple projects

General Discussion
1

I posted this request on IA's Features and Ideas page, but was told it might get extra visibility if I post it here too.

I'd like to know why after picking "Open Designer" in the Designer Launcher, entering my username and password, and then picking "OPEN" for a specific project, I have to do it all over again to open a second project?

Why can't the "Open/Create Project" dialog stay open and allow me to "OPEN" multiple projects, since I'm now logged into the Gateway? This is frustrating for me personally, as I open the same three projects every morning, and have to log in three separate times.

I realize there may be a technical reason why it works this way, but if not, it'd be a huge improvement.

2

It's because you can assign different roles for who can design your different projects so it has to reverify you have the permissions to open the second project.

Very well could be the case you have a gateway where Person A can only edit Project A but should not be able to edit Project B.

I mean maybe you shouldn't have to sign in again idk. But you can set different roles for different designer access on a project basis.

3

Think of it like you're authenticating against each project you open. You happen to use the same credentials. Others may not.

You're not, that's not what is happening. The Designer Launcher is just a launcher, it has no real state, it stores no credentials, enumerating projects requires no authentication.

4

Thanks for the quick replies! Unfortunately, I'm still not sure about the reason.

If the project list was left open, and every project I tried to "OPEN" used my previously entered credentials, why wouldn't that work? The system would still be "authenticating against each project you open", but it would use my already entered user/pass, and not make make me enter them again.

The only advantage I can see with the current design is the single mouse-click to close the project list window..

But maybe I'm still not understanding something, so any additional feedback is appreciated.

5

Even if that flow were modified so the project list stayed open, two immediate problems come to mind:

  1. we would be holding your credentials in memory, in plaintext, which is no good
  2. stored credentials or not, I don't think this would work with IdPs

If there's a feature request for it then eventually someone will come along and think about it harder than I have here. Maybe there's a way it can be done, maybe there's better reasons it can't.

6

Very good. That makes sense. And maybe as you suggest, there'll be a future feature request that provides this behavior without negative side effects.

Thanks again for responding so quickly.

7

Kevin,
Maybe an option to just spawn another designer session from the first one? Like the launch project menu options?
You do NOT have to authenticate when you use the File-Open option to switch projects in designer, so a simple option to "launch" a designer in a new process would be nice actually.

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8

The auth result is part of the session. If you launched another designer with the same session, the gateway wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

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9

Could be something there. There’s so much auth variety now that I probably should have stayed quiet.

10

If you're using "classic" auth, you could save a shell script (batch file, whatever) on your local machine that duplicates the command line to launch the project and hardcodes the login information. There's command line flags you can pass in to the process:

-Djavaws.ignition.debug=true
-Dautologin.username=admin
-Dautologin.password=password

So you could skip the Designer Launcher entirely and just automatically launch the three processes.
Not as 'nice' as a first party solution, but it gets you going today.

What's really being asked for here is for the designer to allow you to open multiple projects at the same time. That's a huge undertaking because there's so many assumptions in the software that a given designer is only interacting with one project at a time. A refactor to fix that would be a highlight feature of a major Ignition release. It's also, frankly, not particularly likely to happen.

11

Blergh, don’t let this crap out of the bag :grimacing:

Not recommended, not promised to work forever. It’s a developer convenience and not intended for users.

12

It also sets every logger to DEBUG, which absolutely kills any ordinary use (as it should). I don't think you have to worry about this one propagating.

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13

What I could see as a possibility would be some generic function in the gateway that clones a session into a new session, to be handed (via cookie) to the new designer or client. That would capture the auth without the confusion. Not sure how that would play with external IdPs.

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