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Workspace Applications

Purpose

Access to workspaces is also controlled using app registrations - one per workspace. The configuration of the app registration depends on the nature of the workspace, but this section covers the typical minimum settings.

Application Roles

Display name Description Allowed member types Value
Workspace Owner Provides workspace owners access to the Workspace. Users/Groups,Applications WorkspaceOwner
Workspace Researcher Provides researchers access to the Workspace. Users/Groups,Applications WorkspaceResearcher
Airlock Manager Provides airlock managers access to the Workspace and ability to review airlock requests. Users/Groups,Applications AirlockManager

Microsoft Graph Permissions

Name Type* Admin consent required TRE usage
email Delegated No Used to read the user's email address when creating TRE resources
openid Delegated No Allows users to sign in to the app with their work or school accounts and allows the app to see basic user profile information.
profile Delegated No Used to read the user's profile when creating TRE resources

'*' See the difference between delegated and application permission types. See Microsoft Graph permissions reference for more details.

Clients

This identity should only be used by the API Application.

How to create

There are two mechanisms for creating Workspace Applications - Manually by your AAD Tenant Admin (default) - Automatically by TRE. Please see this guide if you wish this to be automatic.

Caution

By default, the app registration for a workspace is not created by the API. One needs to be present before using the API to provision a new workspace. If you ran make auth, a workspace AD application was created for you. If you wish to create another, the same script can be used to create the Workspace Application.

Example on how to run the script:

  ./devops/scripts/aad/create_workspace_application.sh \
    --name "${TRE_ID} - workspace 11" \
    --admin-consent \
    --ux-clientid "${SWAGGER_UI_CLIENT_ID}" \
    --automation-clientid "${TEST_ACCOUNT_CLIENT_ID}" \
    --application-admin-clientid "${APPLICATION_ADMIN_CLIENT_ID}"
Argument Description
--name The name of the application. This will be suffixed with 'API' by the script.
--ux-clientid This value is one of the outputs when you first ran the script. It is mandatory if you use admin-consent.
--admin-consent Grants admin consent for the app registrations. This is required for them to function properly, but requires AAD admin privileges.
--automation-clientid This is an optional parameter but will grant the Automation App (created in step 1) permission to the new workspace app.
--application-admin-clientid This is a required parameter , and should be a client id that will be added to the Owners of the AAD Application so that it can be administered within TRE.
--reset-password Optional, default is 0. When run in a headless fashion, 1 is passed in to always reset the password.

Caution

The script will create an app password (client secret) for the workspace and write to /devops/auth.env. These values are only shown once, if you lose them, the script will create new secrets if run again.

If you do not wish to grant the Automation App permission to your workspace, just remove the --automation-clientid from the command.

Environment Variables

Variable Description Location
WORKSPACE_API_CLIENT_ID The Client Id ./devops/auth.env
WORKSPACE_API_CLIENT_SECRET The client secret ./devops/auth.env

Comments

When the Workspace AAD app is registered by running make auth, the Workspace Scope Id is the same as the Client Id. When the Workspace AAD app is created by the base workspace, the Workspace Scope Id will be in this format api://<TRE_ID>_ws_<WORKSPACE_SHORT_IDENTIFIER>