I'm building an app where the user will receive an invite to join a team.
The invite link is unique to the user, and when the user hits the sign-up page, they they can login using oauth (google).
After the user goes through the authentication and gets passed back to my app, I need to get their invite code, so I can look it up in the db and add them to the correct team.
I thought I could pass a state variable to the oauth provider which would get passed back to me like auth?state=INVITE_CODE, but when I send a state parameter to google in my auth request, it doesn't respond at all.
What's the best way to accomplish this?
I'm using express passport if that makes any difference.
I was WAY over thinking this, so hopefully this will help somebody else.
If you look at the res.headers.referer it is actually your original link, not the link from the oauth provider, which I expected.
Related
*Apologies in advance for the long background but I think it is necessary and helpful to other devs once this is answered.
Background
I am building a very social web-application in which there are several events that trigger social actions such as updating the user's Twitter status.
Currently, I use a library called "TweetMoaSharp" (.NET) to handle the Oauth workflows and events that trigger a status update or follow action work brilliantly as long as the user is briefly redirected to the Twitter authentication page.
To clarify, the user is not asked to re-authorize my app each time, but there is an unsightly flicker that lasts for 1-2 seconds while the user is directed to Twitter and then back to my app. This will annoy the end user as there are frequent Twitter interactions.
So--to relieve the situation, I use TweetMoaSharp to obtain an OAuth Access Token via the server and then store that token along with the user id returned from Twitter in my database. I then set a cookie on the client that contains the user's Twitter Id so that for future requests I can simply pass that ID to the server, grab the OAuth token form the database and do my business. No redirect required!
Problem Solved, Right?
Well, no. Stupidly, I overlooked the fact that this can cause a collision with multiple Twitter Accounts being used on the same page and ended up tweeting test-tweets to a second twitter account I own because I had changed Twitter sessions. This could happen to any user(s) who access multiple Twitter accounts from the same browser; a husband and wife for example.
Back to the Drawing Board
I thought to myself, "The Facebook JavaScript API" makes it super easy to get the id of the currently logged in user without going through a bunch of server-side token steps so I am sure Twitter offers the same approach." Ha! I haven't found one yet.
Bottom Line / Question
How do I get the ID of the currently authenticated Twitter user without redirecting them to Twitter (even for just a second)? If I can do this, then I can compare the returned ID to the one in my cookie and know if it is valid for my application's current session or if I need to have that (new) user authenticate as well so that I avoid "Tweeting" under the wrong account.
Thanks in advance.
Use your app tokens to do a verify credentials call
https://api.twitter.com/1.1/account/verify_credentials.json
The returned info is the logged in user.
Unfortunately limited to 15 calls per 15 minute window!
I've been looking into OAuth for a while, but haven't implemented it in any of my applications yet. I'm having trouble really understanding the full concept, so I still have a few questions that I haven't found an answer to, so I hope that anyone can help me.
I want a user to be able to start my application (WP8), login to facebook / twitter / microsoft / ... .
When he gets authenticated, I want to actually save this user to my own DB so I can add some user specific stuff like preferences, posts, ... .
What do I need to save in my own DB to specify a user?
Do I need to save the token itself or is this something that will be invalidated after a while? Or do I need to specify the user's name? With other words: What can I use as a unique identifier?
And what happens when a user would authenticate with for example facebook and he deletes his account?
And one more question, would you ever allow a user to connect to an application with 2 different service providers? If so, how would you make the coupling of these 2 providers to 1 user in your own DB?
I hope my questions are clear enough!
If not, don't hesitate to ask for more information!
Kind regards,
Gert
I assume that you have your own back-end where you authenticate your own users and your WP8 application is just a client.
First, let me distinguish between a user credential and a user profile. User credential is something that validates who the user is, e.g. username/password, facebook user id supplied with a valid auth token. User profile, is what you store in your own database about the user.
You also need to distinguish between a token you use to authenticate the user and the AccessToken Facebook needs to grant you access to user's data.
So... to answer your questions:
What do I need to save in my own DB to specify a user?
Create a record with user data (like preferences, and your unique user ID), and user's login method (e.g. Facebook) and credential (e.g. Facebook's user ID). This is your user's profile.
Do I need to save the token itself or is this something that will be invalidated after a while?
You can also store the Facebook AccessToken here if you've been granted "offline access" privileges by Facebook, but that is used for Facebook's access by you... not by the user's access to your app/back-end. For user's access you could just use a mechanism similar to cookie-based authentication - it's up to you. You could use the AccessToken as a kind of a "cookie", but you would need to always check against Facebook that it's valid.
With other words: What can I use as a unique identifier?
You could treat Facebook's ID as unique (so long as you never allow another account in your user profile DB to link with the same Facebook account)
And what happens when a user would authenticate with for example facebook and he deletes his account?
It's a good idea to have users still create a username/password combination that works with you site and only rely on Facebook login for convenience. In any case, Facebook provides a "Deauthorize Callback URL" when you create an app profile on Facebook. This is called when a user deactivates your app or deletes an account with Facebook. When you receive this call, you could send your user an email when an auth link to setup a different credential so as to not lose access.
would you ever allow a user to connect to an application with 2 different service providers? If so, how would you make the coupling of these 2 providers to 1 user in your own DB?
Sure, you could do that. Say you'd want to allow a Twitter account as well. You'd need to add a Twitter user ID field to your user profile database.
Here's another tip: create an ASP.NET MVC4 project in Visual Studio - the template includes an example of how to set up a user profile database with OAuth login.
Hope it gives you the high-level overview to investigate further.
My goal is to use these bundles to connect to MailChimp OAuth or Facebook (not necessarily as a login option but that could come later - right now just want my app authorized to access the MailChimp API) - I've got the whole process somewhat working in the sense that I can be redirect to MailChimp or Facebook, allow my app and the I am always redirected to to my failur_path as defined in my security.yml. I presume this is correct behavior since I do not have users with the matching tokens. My question is... how do I create these users in the first place? Or rather how do I get the provided oauth token into the user's data for later user/authentication?
Thanks
I know it's old, but in case someone didn't find it:
https://gist.github.com/danvbe/4476697
as I started to work with Twitterizer in order to publish on someone's wall I am in confusing time.
There is a page, my case, DefaultTwitter.aspx where is link to authenticate on twitter with token provided. Goes on Twitter and comes back to CallbackTwitter.aspx with outh_token and secret. And so the user is identified. On twitterizer example says:
Step 5 - Store the results
You should now store the access token and the user details. Keep in mind that the
only way an access token will become invalid is if the user revokes access by logging
into Twitter. Otherwise, those values will grant you access to that user's data
forever.
My questions are: - should I store any data in SQL datatable and what exactly(however I hope that is not the case to do so)
somebody said that I should save in a cookie(I thought in session); however then if another user comes then how should I create a button to logout or something like that?
-how will user revoke application access if he would like so?
A live example will be much appreciated as I could not found any on internet how exactly twitter api works.
When your application finishes getting authorization to access the user's data, the result is the access token (represented by 2 values, a key and a secret). Those values are, in effect, the username/password you can use in requests to the API on behalf of that user.* Save those values in your SQL database. You'll also be given the user id and screen name. It's probably a good idea to keep those handy, too.
The user can revoke access to an application by going to http://twitter.com/settings/applications, finding the application and clicking the revoke access button next to it. Your application cannot revoke access for the user.
You asked for an example, but you're citing the example application. Just look at the source code in that sample.
* - That's a simplification for explanation sake. Please don't crucify me, OAuth experts.
I am adding Twitter and Facebook login to a MVC 3 test application using TweetSharp and Facebook C# SDK.
Currently when a user signs in using Twitter I create a user account for that user in a user table and store the id, token, and token secret in a separate table with a foreign key to the user table. Since the id, token and token secret do not expire I can quickly locate the right user account when the user logs in next time using Twitter.
What if the very same user logs in using Facebook next time? Since Twitter does not provide email in their API and I therefore have no common piece of information to tie a user account to either Twitter or Facebook I assume I have to create a new user account for a Facebook login? Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any ways to solve this?
I identify each user internally with a unique key. I check cookies for the user key when any user hits the site. If there's no cookie I create a new key. add it to the user database and set a new cookie. Once a user completes registration the first time by logging in with any of Facebook, Twitter or .Net membership , that key is forever married to that user.
So when an existing Twitter user logs in for the first time with Facebook, we know who they are because their user key exists. It is basically the same solution as macou suggested. Macou's has the plus of working on a new machine or if cookies are cleared, the cookie solution has the plus of not requiring additional user input.
Not really a solution, more of a work around. I was faced with the same problem and ended up forcing the user to complete thier account profile by asking for their email address before allowing them to proceed any further. This meant that if the email address coming back with the Facebook auth matched the email address created with the twitter signin then I didn't need to create another account.
The bigger difficulty was coming the other way, if the account was created by the facebook auth first. It meant an untidy marry up of accounts.
To be honest the information we got from allowing users to sign in with twitter was not worth the effort and in the end finished up only allowing Facebook auths. I'm not sure how important twitter is to your solution.
Not the perfect answer I know, but I thought I would share my experience.
You can't use just a cookie because I can login as facebook then my wife login as twitter using the same browser, you shouldn't link the two accounts in this case.
I think you need to do more than that:
Use a cookie then
Use name/first name/login name/... to see if they match.
Example:
Cookie id: 18459439731114330636, find user with id = 18459439731114330636. Found, go to 2, not found, go to 3.
Is username/first name/last name/... matches the current user? if yes, link accounts. if not, go to 3.
Create a new user.