Ticket secret generators¶
pretix allows you to change the way in which ticket secrets (also known as “ticket codes”, “barcodes”, …) are generated. This affects the value of the QR code in any tickets issued by pretix, regardless of ticket format.
Note
This is intended for highly advanced use cases, usually when huge numbers of tickets (> 25k per event) are involved. If you don’t know whether you need this, you probably don’t.
Default: Random secrets¶
By default, pretix generates a random code for every ticket, consisting of 32 lower case characters and
numbers. The characters oO1il are avoided to reduce confusion when ticket codes are printed and need to
be typed in manually.
Choosing random codes has a number of advantages:
Ticket codes are short, which makes QR codes easier to scan. At the same time, it is absolutely impossible to guess or forge a valid ticket code.
The code does not need to change if the ticket changes. For example, if an attendee is re-booked to a different product or date, they can keep their ticket and it is just mapped to the new product in the database.
This approach works really well for 99 % or events running with pretix. The big caveat is that the scanner needs to access a database of all ticket codes in order to know whether a ticket code is valid and what kind of ticket it represents.
When scanning online this is no problem at all, since the pretix server always has such a database. In case your local internet connection is interrupted or the pretix server goes down, though, there needs to be a database locally on the scanner.
Therefore, our pretixSCAN apps by default download the database of all valid tickets onto the device itself. This makes it possible to seamlessly switch into offline mode when the connection is lost and continue scanning with the maximum possible feature set.
There are a few situations in which this approach is not ideal:
When running a single event with 25k or more valid tickets, downloading all ticket data onto the scanner may just take too much time and resources.
When the risk of losing sensible data by losing one of the scanner devices is not acceptable.
When offline mode needs to be used regularly and newly-purchased tickets need to be valid immediately after purchase, without being able to tolerate a few minutes of delay.
Signature schemes¶
The alternative approach that is included with pretix is to choose a signature-based ticket code generation scheme. These secrets include the most important information that is required for verifying their validity and use modern cryptography to make sure they cannot be forged.
Currently, pretix ships with one such scheme (“pretix signature scheme 1”) which encodes the product, the product variation, and the date (if inside an event series) into the ticket code and signs the code with a EdDSA signature. This allows to verify whether a ticket is allowed to enter without any database or connection to the server, but has a few important drawbacks:
Whenever the product, variation or date of a ticket changes or the ticket is canceled, the ticket code needs to be changed and the old code needs to be put on a revocation list. This revocation list again needs to be downloaded by all scanning devices (but is usually much smaller than the ticket database). The main downside is that the attendee needs to download their new ticket and can no longer use the old one.
Scanning in offline mode is much more limited, since the scanner has no information about previous usages of the ticket, attendee names, seating information, etc.
Comparison of scanning behavior¶
Scan mode |
Online |
Offline |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Synchronization setting |
any |
Synchronize orders |
Don’t synchronize orders |
||
Ticket secrets |
any |
Random |
Signed |
Random |
Signed |
Scenario supported on platforms |
Android, Desktop, iOS |
Android, Desktop, iOS |
Android, Desktop |
Android, Desktop, iOS |
Android, Desktop, iOS |
Synchronization speed for large data sets |
slow |
slow |
fast |
fast |
|
Tickets can be scanned |
yes |
yes |
yes |
no |
yes |
Ticket is valid after sale |
immediately |
next sync (~5 minutes) |
immediately |
never |
immediately |
Same ticket can be scanned multiple times |
no |
yes, before data is synced |
yes, before data is synced |
n/a |
yes, always |
Custom check-in rules |
yes |
yes |
yes (limited directly after sale) |
n/a |
yes, but only based on product, variation and date, not on previous scans |
Name and seat visible on scanner |
yes |
yes |
yes (except directly after sale) |
n/a |
no |
Order-specific check-in attention flag |
yes |
yes |
yes (except directly after sale) |
n/a |
no |
Ticket search by order code or name |
yes |
yes |
yes (except directly after sale) |
no |
no |
Check-in statistics on scanner |
yes |
yes |
mostly accurate |
no |
no |
Support for add-on check-in with main ticket |
yes |
yes |
yes (except directly after sale) |
no |
no |