This repository contains a list of institutions that support InAcademia and allows a servcie to hint to InAcademia where to try validation of the users affiliation

IdP_hinting is an extension to the InAcademia service that intends to assist merchants who are keen to reduce the number of clicks a student needs to make in validating a sale or registration process, and can also be used in offering services to use cases in specified countries. By making a list of uniquely referenced IdPs available on a country-by-country basis, it is possible for the merchant to target specific institutions or subsets of institutions with specific campaigns.

The IdP hinting is based on the list of academia institutions as published by eduGAIN. When IdP hinting is used, it will allow Academia to directly route a user to the selected institution, without the need for any additional interaction by the user.

Institution will sometimes change the technical infrastructure InAcademia relies on to validate a user, e.g. with a new version of their software, or when the name of the institution changes. In such cases the IdP hint information needs to be updated as well. While these changes are not frequent on a per institution level, it is still recommended to automatically refresh the list a merchant used on a nightly basis. In the rare case the IdP hinting fails, InAcademia will fall back to a scenario where the user is requested to manually select its home institution. If the IdP_hinting service directs the user to the Discovery, the user can select the correct IdP. However, merchants must be aware that at this point a user could select an alternative IdP, rather than the IdP that the merchant has offered the discount to. The merchant must, therefore, always verify that the validation returns from the institution used to initiate the validation in order to mitigate the risk the users who are members of multiple IdPs claiming discounts to which they are not entitled.