Owners of data repositoried want to be able to make their data easy to access and interact with. They often host their own pages with catalog of their datasets, and they would like to include Renku links there so that users can launch a Renku session to inspect the data live.
However, it does not make sense for these users to create data connectors for every one of their datasets in advance. That would be a lot of up-front work! To support these use cases, we would like to offer a lower-barrier-to-entry solution.
Motivating use cases from users/potential users include:
3 weeks
The core of the solution is that users can create session launch links for Renku projects, and pass a parameter that represents the dataset to the session. This parameter will be available in the session as an environment variable.
This way, the user can create 1 Renku project with the environment needed to explore their datasets, and then generate session launch links for each dataset, where the only thing that changes in each link is the dataset that is referenced in the launch link.
Launch links and session environment variables will each be made available as independent features, and also they can be combined in order to pass parameters for session launch links.
Creating a launch link
When I want to allow people to start a session on my Renku project from a button or link,
I navigate to my Renku project, and to the session launcher I want launched,
and I click in a drop down menu to generate a Launch Link
and I am shown a link that I can copy
(I am offered both plain text and as an html badge)
so I can easily put this launch link somewhere else.