British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access


WAYFless URLs allow users to gain access to resources without having to select their institution from the Where Are You From (WAYF) drop-down list on the Learning on Screen site. This works by including the institution’s authentication point as part of the URL. For this reason, each institution’s WAYFless URL will be different.

Please note that if you are using a WAYFless URL we will not have the chance to seek user consent to create a session cookie when users reach our website. You must notify those users who will be using the WAYFless URL of this fact on our behalf (for more information read our privacy and cookies policy).

To create a WAYFless URL for BoB, you should use the following template:

You will need to replace INSTITUTION_IDP with your own IdP entity ID (ensure that there is a single question mark before the entityID). You also need to use an escaped version of the URL. Escaping or encoding the URL replaces certain characters with codes, e.g. %2F in the place of a backslash. Once you have incorporated your IdP into this template the WAYFless URL can be tested and published on your site.

Here is an example of a WAYFless URL using the BUFVC/Learning on Screen entity ID:

More information about WAYFless URLs is available here.