Calling the SKY API from a Desktop Application (VB/VBA)

Brandon Amancio

Hello All,

I am working in VBA and need to develop a way to interact with the SKY API from a desktop application (MS Access).

Does anyone out there have any experience with this or with something similar? Can you point me to any guides or code samples that can assist me?

I previously built a utility in VBA to interact with SalesForce (which also uses OAuth+Restful) but SalesForce doesn't require the user to login to the BLKB website as a part of the authorization process. While I haven't actually started work on this yet, I am concerned about both passing the necessary variables to the browser and then collecting the token generated by that process.

Any help or guidance on how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Alex Wong

@Brandon Amancio
There are quite a few discussion topic on running standalone, the basic idea is to get the authentication token (1 way to do so is using postman). Once you have the token, you will also get a refresh token. TOken is good for 60 minutes while refresh token is good for 365 days.

You can use refresh token to get new token without user interaction.

Brandon Amancio

@Alex Wong Thank you for that info, but that isn't going to work for me. This utility is built into our software. It will be used directly by our clients so the process needs to be self contained within the application. I understand that I will need to launch a web browser so that the user can self authenticate, but otherwise, it all needs to be self contained within our application.

Steven Cinquegrana

@Brandon Amancio
You don’t necessarily need to launch a web browser. In fact that’s harder now that the native IE-based WebBrowser control isn’t useable.

We used to do this in our SKYLib.NET code library but now we just display the web link in a basic form for the user to paste into their own (supported) browser. They then paste back the returned auth code and away we go. Perhaps try that approach.

Contact me by DM if you want more info.

Alex Wong

@Brandon Amancio
what I mentioned does not require user to self authenticate.

User (you) authenticate 1x through postman to get refresh token and token. store this (securely) somewhere that your application can read from. before you make an API call, you app will call another API endpoint and provide the refresh token (along with other important info) to get a authenitcation token for use in subsequent API call.