A year ago the edu-ID account management and login pages got a new look. Next is the Discovery Service, also known as WAYF (Where Are You From) service to wear some new colours and also be more user-friendly.
What does the WAYF do?
The WAYF service does nothing more than direct the user to the login page of the user’s organisation. So, it works like a signpost. On July 14th 2025 the sign post will be newly painted and it comes with a few features that make the redirection even easier.
Switch operates the central WAYF service on wayf.switch.ch for all services that don’t have their own Discovery Service. The Switch WAYF also includes the Embedded WAYF, which basically is a set of JavaScripts that embed the WAYF functionality directly into a service without redirecting the users’ web browser to wayf.switch.ch.
Old vs New WAYF
Till the above-mentioned launch date, the central WAYF service looks like:
It always shows all 65+ organisations that were part of the Switch edu-ID federation (formerly known SWITCHaai federation), regardless if the service was accepting users from all or or only a subset of these organisations.
With the new version this will change and the WAYF will look like below:
So, what is new?
The most important changes are:
- The design is now consistent with the other edu-ID services. This makes the login process more consistent for services that use the central WAYF provided by Switch. This also comes with improved responsiveness on smaller screens.
- Only those organisations are shown which match the intended audience for the service that the user accesses. The intended audience of a service is defined in the Resource Registry. In the example screenshot above, the intended audience of the service includes only four organisations. Therefore, only these four organisations are shown in the WAYF.
- If there is no cookie available with the last organisation the user chose, the WAYF is now better at guessing the user’s organisation. For this it now takes into account the IP range the user is part of. Organisations can define their IP ranges in the Resource Registry. For most organisations Switch already added the known IP ranges.
- Users can now change the language of the WAYF
- The organisation “Switch edu-ID”, which is becoming more and more the default choice for most users, is now prominently placed at the top of the list.
How to test and preview
If you want to see the new WAYF in action before the official launch date and want to report feedback or test it with your own services, you can do this in the following ways:
- A quick and easy test can be performed by accessing the Demo Service in the test federation. The Test WAYF already uses the same look and the same code as the production one will be using.
- Changing the URL (e.g. in browser URL bar, in shibboleth2.xml configuration or in Embedded WAYF URL) from https://wayf.switch.ch/SWITCHaai/WAYF to https://wayf.switch.ch/SWITCHaai.new/WAYF will load the new WAYF.
- An alternative approach to test the production WAYF that will be activated on the date mentioned above, temporarily change your local /etc/host file to point the hostname wayf.switch.ch to the staging host by adding these entries:
# Temporary wayf.switch.ch staging host 86.119.30.116 wayf.switch.ch 2001:620:5ca1:2f0:f816:3eff:fec1:ab2c wayf.switch.ch
Don’t forget to remove the above entries again after testing because the staging host will be removed some time after the launch.
Do I have to change anything?
The short answer: No.
We have tested the WAYF already internally for some time and we also tested login to the top 10 services that use the Embedded WAYF. No changes should be necessary for services.
For the Embedded WAYF very little should change when it comes to the design as there were only very few CSS improvements applied. Still, it may be wise for service operators to perform the above-mentioned test drive by temporarily adapting the /etc/host file and logging in to the own service.
One thing that some services could adapt is their documentation. While the general workflow will stay the same, screenshots may have to be updated because of the new design.
Open Source by Switch
The Switch WAYF has been an open source project for years and it thus has been used by many federations around the world for millions of users. Thanks to this, some features and translations were contributed by colleagues from all over the world.
One of these features is for example an alternative way to render and use the drop down list based on the select 2 library, which queries the entries via dynamic HTTP requests based on the search term. While this feature may not be needed in our (small) federation, it can be useful for federations with hundreds of organisations.
More on this feature may follow in a separate blog post.
