Confusing behavior: Autodesk login and ShotGrid login

We encountered a strange and frustrating thing with ShotGrid authentication.
If you login on the Autodesk website, then the ShotGrid login is limited to only that account. Trying to sign out and back in again, you are automatically logged in with that account. Switch user does not present any other options but that user.
The only solution is to go to autodesk.com and sign out from there.

Is this intended? We somehow though the Autodesk sign-in was common to both sites, thus expecting to be able to switch from the ShotGrid website as well.

Hi @mmoshev

Autodesk Identity is a form of Single-Sign On. The assumption is that if you are using it for ShotGrid, then you are using it for other things from that same browser (other ShotGrid sites, other Autodesk Cloud products, AKN, support, etc.). It works using cookies, that the login gate of Autodesk Identity sets to keep track of your current session. Once logged-in, all the applications will send you there to authenticate, and you will be automatically redirected back to your application in a logged-in state because of those cookies. Sometimes you will not even realize that this is happening, the back-and-forth happening quick enough so that your browser does not even show a page change.

So having the Sign Out do a global sign out of all active session of Autodesk Identity is a bit like the nuclear option… and may not be want you want. Suddenly finding yourself logged out of all the other apps from an action in just one.

Admittedly, we could add a Sign out of Autodesk Identity which would prompt a warning. For the time being, to log out of you Autodesk Identity user, you usually need to do so from https://profile.autodesk.com or from https://shotgrid.autodesk.com

You can have multiple ShotGrid users associated to the same Autodesk Identity account (usually with different roles, to separate administration from work). Doing a Sign Out of ShotGrid is one way to get back to the user selector screen which is shown when multiple users are associated to the same Identity account (that is what the Switch User menu is for… but it needs more polishing I think).

So the behaviour you are observing is intended.

-Patrick

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I have been caught on this during testing our migration. It wasn’t really obvious until I did some isolation testing and figured it out.

I don’t think the majority of artists will run into this, but freelancers could have multiple Autodesk accounts, both one personally and then one with our studio depending on their process of signing into SG and creating an Autodesk account.

I have also found that on a related topic if 2FA is enabled for a site, and a user has an existing logged in Autodesk account, the SG site reports that a 2FA enabled account is required at which point they are given 1 option and that is to sign in with a different account, but at that point they are then stuck in a redirect loop between clicking that button, then SG checking the cookies, and reporting back to the same screen. Here is where you’d Ideally have an option to navigate to the Autodesk profile with a message indicating to enable 2FA or to sign out globally of the current Autodesk account and sign in with a new one.

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Hi @Halil

I can understand the potential confusion, as I often switch between numerous Autodesk Identity accounts myself to do tests… I have taken to the habit of using multiple Chrome profiles, but I understand that this is my own solution to the issue, and we do need something more graceful. We are juggling with a few ideas at the moment.

As for your 2FA issue, this has been fixed in our development code and should make it out to clients on Wednesday : when you get the error about 2FA being needed, we also provide a link to https://profile.autodesk.com/security from the message. To make it easier to the user (who may at that point have never visited that site if they did receive an invitation by email to create their account) to correct their configuration.

-Patrick

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This is great news @patrick-hubert-adsk this will help smooth the migration process, thanks.