Anonymous access to a shared database

[spiffytech]

I have a use case where users will be able to share data publicly, to anyone with the URL. Shared data will be unlisted, like unlisted YouTube videos, so anonymous logged-out users need to be able to see exclusively the thing shared with them.

Can I implement this with Userbase? I see items can generate a shareToken for a database (and I guess move each shared item into a dedicated database), which sounds exactly like what I want, except a user has to be registered in Userbase to open a database using a shareToken, so no anonymous access.

Does Userbase have a way to solve this?

[IvanCoronado]

I have the same question. Which one is the userbase way to allow users to have public data?

[j-berman]

You are correct - the shareToken is the exact way to go about sharing data in that way (or sharing data publicly), though a user must be signed in to open a database.

Allowing non-signed in users to open a database with a shareToken is now on the roadmap (if curious, see more detailed discussion on this in #157).

For now, a workaround to this is to call signUp in the background with a randomly generated username and password before calling openDatabase with the shareToken. Not a clean approach, but it's doable :)

@IvanCoronado - see #250 for how to use the shareToken for your circumstance. Will have easier-to-follow tutorials on that available on the website soon!

[IvanCoronado]

ty @j-berman for the workaround. I will give it a try.

[notthatnathan]

I had a similar use case to @spiffytech, so excited about the possibility of shareToken not requiring login.

Another hole here that somebody might have a solution for: if you had a url like youtube.com/watch/:id, there appears to be no way in userbase to query based on a key (an index). So even if a database were shared publicly, how would one find the right database?