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Connecting via a web service?

Tom Salyers

Hi, all. I'm familiar with REST APIs in general, but this is my first time working with this particular set. I'm trying to set up a web service that'll query the Constituent API to see whether a particular ID is in the system--it's a pretty simple check to see if a user exists or not.

So far I've created an application with my account and asked the system admin to load it for our environment. I'd appreciate some pointers as to where to go next, though. Other APIs I've worked with in this kind of case usually have me get an OAuth token that lasts for an hour or so, and use that in subsequent calls to the API. Is that the case here?

I guess mainly what I'm looking for is a “For Dummies” version of how to get started, if anyone's got one. Thanks in advance. ?

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Daniel Leonard

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your interest in the SKY Developer ecosystem!

Sometimes people like to get started using the SKY API Console. If you prefer, you can also get an idea of how Authoirzation works in our documentation and use Postman or your preferred way to communicate with APIs.

Tom Salyers

Hi, Daniel.

Thanks for that. I've had a look, and I just wanted to confirm something--is there really no way to do headless authentication? That is, does the auth flow require someone to click a website button? If so, that's a bit of a speed bump for the web service I'm doing.

Daniel Leonard

Hi Tom,

On our showcase page we have an example of a headless data sync that may be helpful.

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Ben Lambert

Hi Tom,

The SKY API authorization model is based on an end-user providing consent. API calls happen in the context of that consenting user so that our backend can respect that user's security permissions. So at some point, a user has to log into a website and click an “Authorize” button.

In addition to the links Daniel provided, you might want to watch a few mins of this video I recorded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3vrbSPAZU

In this video, at around the 17:35 I discuss the authorization model in a bit more detail, and then at 25:10 I demonstrate a technique you can use to get an access token (and refresh token) without having to write a web service to handle initiating OAuth and the redirect upon the user's consent. The technique uses Postman (a popular/common free tool) that has built-in support for OAuth - you just plug in your registered SKY application ID/secret and a few other values and it will handle launching the browser to initiate OAuth as well as fielding the redirect after consent. You can then take the access token and refresh token values returned to Postman and paste them into your application to make API calls.

Tom Salyers

Thanks, both. I've managed to grab myself a refresh token with Postman that seems to be working okay, and now I'm interacting with the API from Python with no problems so far.