Anonymous Views/Forms
You can mark specific Views and Forms to be available anonymously. For example, you may wish to expose a View or Form to public users who do not have user accounts in your organization's Active Directory. Enabling Anonymous Access on a View or Form allows these external users to access the View or Form without having to provide credentials.
- An Internet Information Services (IIS) web site, application or virtual directory can be configured to run anonymously; the Application Pool Account user is used to log into K2 Server on the site. The Anonymous Access View or Form setting is not required for this scenario. See the K2 smartforms Configuration and Installation Guide for more information.
- The Anonymous Access View or Form setting allows a View or Form to be marked as Anonymous. This allows the View or Form to be executed as the Application Pool Account user inside a site that normally requires authentication. The Anonymous Access View or Form setting is more secure and removes the need for a second site configured for anonymous access.
There are two approaches that can be used to enable anonymous access: (1) You can create a separate SmartForms runtime site and configure that site to run anonymously (note that this option is not available in K2 Appit for SharePoint), or (2) you can mark specific Views and Forms to be accessed anonymously.
How to use the Anonymous Access property setting
- Create a View or Form.
- Edit the View or Form.
- In the Properties section under Advanced, select Anonymous Access.
View:Form:
- Obtain or determine the runtime URL for the anonymous View or Form. (You can use the View or Form Properties page to determine the URL. You may need to replace the server address part of the URL with the server address of the runtime URL)
- Access the URL as an anonymous user. The View or Form opens without requiring credentials.
Considerations
- A subview or subform opened from a View or Form should also be configured for Anonymous Access. The property is not automatically inherited by subviews or subforms and must be set individually on the View or Form's properties.
- User context information such as Name, Display Name, e-mail, Manager, FQN, etc. is not populated on an anonymous View or Form since there is no user context.
- Behind the scenes, the View or Form runs in the context of the user account of the Application Pool associated with the runtime SmartForms site. Therefore, any integration requiring credentials (for example SmartObject interaction using the Impersonation authentication mode or starting a workflow) executes under the context of the Application Pool user ID.
- If a View or Form is checked-in and marked as Anonymous, the View or Form is run under the AppPool user (as if the AppPool user was accessing the View or Form). If the View or Form is then checked-out, edited and saved by the same user as the AppPool is configured to run under, then all users running the View or Form will see the new edited changes (even if the View or Form is not checked in again). This is due to the changes that were made by the AppPool user account which is the user under which the View or Form runs for all users.
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