Delta sharing recipient auth status

drag7ter — Mon, 19 May 2025 08:31:38 GMT

I'm creating recipients, and send them activation link via email. All recipients are external (they don't have databricks account). Lets say I've created 300 recipients and I want to know who downloaded creds fail successfully, and got authenticated.

At this moment I can monitor this status only in UI, for those who still don't download creds this status shows "Pending".

In DESCRIBE RECIPIENT command output I don't see any details about activation status

Is there any way how can I get statuses for all recipients programmatically?

Re: Delta sharing recipient auth status

Isi — Mon, 19 May 2025 08:58:42 GMT

Hey @drag7ter

You’re absolutely right, currently, there is no official API field that explicitly returns the recipient activation status (I just have tested it), even though the Databricks API documentation references a field called activated boolean

In practice, this field is not returned by the GET /api/2.1/unity-catalog/recipients endpoint, nor is it shown in the output of DESCRIBE RECIPIENT <name>

What we’ve observed as a workaround:

When a recipient is created with authentication_type = "TOKEN", the API response and DESCRIBE RECIPIENT includes a field under the token object:

"activation_url": "https://...retrieve_config.html?..."

This activation_url exists only before the recipient has activated (i.e., downloaded) the credentials.
Once the recipient uses the link, the activation_url field disappears from the token, and that’s currently the only reliable signal that the recipient has completed activation.

So, you can use the recipients/list API to fetch all recipients, and programmatically check which still include the activation_url field.

This behavior is not officially documented, and may change in future versions, but for now, it’s the most reliable way we’ve found to monitor recipient activation at scale without relying on the UI...

Hope this helps, 🙂

Isi

topic Delta sharing recipient auth status in Data Engineering

Delta sharing recipient auth status

Re: Delta sharing recipient auth status

What we’ve observed as a workaround: