Hide public/accessible assets from Connect Dashboard?

[sturu]

Hi all,

As per title - is there a way to hide accessible assets from the Connect Dashboard permanently?

I'm thinking of apps created only to be embedded in public websites, or perhaps certain pins created with user/group permissions, but only used/edited by shiny apps/API. There's no need for Dashboard users to know some of these things would exist.

A solution could be to give these an 'invisible' tag, which is only accessible to admins, though perhaps something already exists?

Thanks,

Stuart

[cole]

Hey Stuart!

Unfortunately, I am not aware of anything like this today

I do really like the idea though - even just for convenience, I have often considered that it would be nice to have a way to "hide" things from the dashboard that end up just being "clutter."

To help refine your feedback, is your request mainly to hide these things for security (i.e. you do not want users to find these things) or for organization (i.e. it clutters up the user's view and makes it harder to find things)?

It would be great to understand more of your use case if the former, since the users definitely have access, and you are just looking to obfuscate the location.

[sturu]

Thanks for the response Cole.

Yes it's almost entirely about #1 clutter in my view. Not really a good option to hide stuff for for security, though for some use cases there is potential for #2 using pins to feed off the existing access policies - e.g. only allow users to access to certain data sources based on tokens stored in pins (one per data source) to which they have access, but which wouldn't necessarily need to be seen? I'd guess that type of setup would be pretty easy to maintain via the dashboard (by the pin owner) or the API, by updating the token as required, or by removing access.

Of course the security side of this could be done better by using an external source of data-level permissions (though perhaps this is detrimental for RStudio - im sure users would be really tied-in if their data-level permissions were also handled by Connect!). Alternatively a large number of groups could be used.

I could mirror my theoretical #2 use case without clutter by creating pins as a system user (though without care this will break if permissions change).

I can't get around #1 clutter caused by visibility of public documents I think?

For those public docs which only exist to be embedded in a website perhaps JWT token OAuth authentication from the website host would allow it to embed the app under its own username & remove the need for the app to be publicly listed on Connect without going through the user-level OAuth flow? Not thought that one through properly & I don't have huge experience here, so maybe I'm way off. Hiding it would be much simpler!

Anyway, it'd be interesting to have a decluttering option for some use cases, & (if thought through properly) it might open the door to some security uses too.