I'm a person with a non-programming background working on a web application that must store user-generated content and always associate that content with the user who created it. I just had the developer tell me since the application must do this, using Facebook as an alternate login method is pointless because Facebook only let's a third-party web application hang on to Facebook profile information for a certain amount of time, and therefore users who login via Facebook cannot actually contribute content that would remain in the web application's databases.
I'm having trouble swallowing this. I just signed up and logged in to stackoverflow using my Facebook account, and it appears to have generated a site-specific user ID that was automatically associated with my Facebook account - thereby allowing me to save/store content on the site without having to actually create a site-specific profile.
My questions:
Where is the misunderstanding here? To what extent do alternative login options affect the ability of my application, which will consist largely of user-generated content, to store user-generated data and consistently associate it with that user? Appreciate the help!
Alternative login allows users to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords. Alternate login using facebook, OpenID, gmail or any other provider doesn't affect the ability of your application to store user generated content.
When a user logs in using a login option for e.g. facebook, user enters the facebook login credential(if he isn't already logged in), facebook generates a authenticated token which is utilised by your application for future use.
In case of alternative logins only the login information (User ID/Password) isn't stored in your application, it totally depends on how you are implementing it in your application. But in any case it doesn't affect your application in saving storing and using the user generated content in your website.
Please refer to this link for more info -
http://openid.net/get-an-openid/what-is-openid/
http://oauth.net/
Hope this helps!
Related
I have an interesting use case for you today.
My team and I are building a free, third party, calculator tool that enables users to calculate metrics using their store's data.
We are looking for ways to pull in the necessary data and perform the calculation to show users... so far the best we've come up with is asking the users to export a report from Shopify and upload it into our application.
Looking for a user experience similar to this:
User opens our tool, application is hosted on custom-domain.com
Somehow the user authenticates or logins in to Shopify, or approves our app temporary access to their data.
Our app performs the calculation for the user, ending data access
Any ideas as to how this authentication or access of data can be facilitated? Shopify doesn't seem to have a 'login with Google' kind of authentication button.
Thanks!
There are two modes for authenticated access, namely Online and Offline. What you need in this scenario is Online Access.
From Shopify Docs
Tokens with online access mode are linked to an individual user on a
store, where the access token's lifespan matches the lifespan of the
user's web session. This type of access mode is meant to be used when
a user is interacting with your app through the web, or when an app
must respect an individual user's permission level.This access mode
must be explicitly requested in the authorization phase.
It should also fulfill your needs related to ending data access.
An access token created with this access mode is temporary, and is guaranteed to expire after some amount of time.
When a user logs out of Shopify admin, all online mode access tokens created during the same web session are revoked.
Once you have the access token, you can use Shopify API to query data so that your users don't have to upload any files manually.
So I am having some trouble figuring out how to implement a sign-in for my app using google oauth. Every example I see shows how to authentication the user, get their permissions and then start using the Google APIs.
I do not care about permission or using Google APIs. All I want to do is have the user sign-in to my app using google oauth instead of having to implement my own authentication system with user and passwords in the database.
After the user authenticates with their google account, then they can change settings associated with their account for my app. What is the flow i need to implement to achieve this?
How would I associated a google user with certain data defined in my own app's database? I have successfully implemented the authentication part but then what would I need to store in my DB to associate them with their actions and data. Would I need to use sessions? and then retrieve their Google+ ID, save it in the database and then use that to identify them in the database for later when they log in again?
any help is appreciated
Once the the server validates the access token, a user account can be created in the database, saving the Google ID along other user details (ID, email, name etc).
If your application also supports normal registration, and an account is already present for that user (matching email), then you can just fill in the (nullable) Google ID column in order to link the account(s).
I'm working on an internal website for the company I work for. The website will be only available to company staff. We use Google Apps for Business, so we would like authentication to be done using our google accounts.
I've gone through 'google sign in' samples from here: https://developers.google.com/+/
It works, but the problem we run into is that it requires the user to sign up to Google+. This is a speed bump we would prefer not to have.
Are there any ways around this? Thanks.
It shouldn't be too hard to roll your own sign in using the lower levels of Oauth, eg 'email' scope. It's hard to give a more specific answer because it depends on your architecture (eg. are you predominantly server-side or client-side) and what kind of session do you want to create by the sign in process. For example, if you are client/REST based, you probably don't want any session at all as REST encourages statelessness. On the other hand, if you are more web based, serving static pages, you will want a session.
In simple terms, you will be doing something that generates an access token, and then processing that access token to determine the email address (or Google ID) of the person who created it. You will then establish some sort of session (eg. using session cookies) that identifies future requests from that user.
Feel free to add some more detail to your architecture and I'll try to finesse the answer.
For simple http servlet sessions, it will be something like.
User requests a protected page
servlet detects that there is no session and/or session has no authenticated user
servlet redirects to an Oauth page to request an access code. something like
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?redirect_uri=xxx&response_type=code&client_id=zz&approval_prompt=auto&scope=email
NB research the exact URL, don't rely on this to be exact
If the user isn't logged on, he'll be prompted; if he has multiple logins, he'll be prompted; if he hasn't yet granted email access, he'll be prompted. If none of these conditions are met (the normal case) he won't see anything.
Browser will redirect to the redirect_uri, carrying an access token (or an auth code if this is the first time the user has used the app)
Post the token to the Google userinfo endpoint, and you will receive a decode containing the email address
Store the email into a session object (or retrieve your own user object and store that)
redirect back to the originally requested page. You can use the OAuth state parameter to pass that around
et voila. all future page requests from that user will be within a session containing some user identification.
NB This is just an outline and I may even have missed a step. You will still need to do your own OAuth research.
Apparently not:
(..) if a Google user who has not upgraded to a Google+ account clicks
on the Sign in with Google+ button, the same consent dialog that opens
will take the user into an account upgrade flow.
Weirdly the docs for OAuth2 states:
Google+ Sign-In works for all users with a Google account, whether or
not they have upgraded to Google+.
I am currently developing an app using the Google places API..
https://developers.google.com/places/documentation/
I want to use the Events methods, so that a Place/Business owner can add events..
https://developers.google.com/places/documentation/actions#event_intro
However I obviously need to restrict it, so that only the Business owner can create events for their Business. Is there anyway of authenticating a user via a Google api, to confirm that they are the Place owner? I looked at Google+ however there is no reference to any 'Places' setup by that user in the people request.
Looks like this is possible now. The workflow would be the following:
Your user triggers a places search and selects a specific place in the result
Your user selects an option in your app to claim they are the owner of your place
Your user is redirected into an OAuth flow to Google Places where they login with their Google credentials
Once authenticated, your app is provided with an OAuth token for the user
Your app submits that token along with a Place reference to a Places API owner verification service
The Places API returns a yes/no as to whether the user concerned is the verified owner of the Place
Source - https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=3894 - comment #3
Enjoy!
I am thinking of tying in a Facebook JavaScript-based application with an existing website that has it's own user accounts, but have a question about a specific user situation.
The website is run almost 100% of the time from 'shared' computers, like those found in a career center. User A comes to my website, signs into the site and then authorizes the Facebook app, which stores their session in the browser, along with, effectively, signing them into Facebook.com.
User A now leaves my application by signing out of my site - but not closing the browser.
User B arrives, logs into my site with their login, but the Facebook session is still active (due to the browser staying open), so any FB app integrations I've included will show as if it is still user A, correct?
So the question is, what are the recommended ways to deal with this? Two options come to mind:
When the user signs out of my website, I fire an FB.logout call, so that all of the sessions are killed. Pros - I can ensure that user's signing into the site will not have old sessions hanging around. Cons - a user who is returning shortly after leaving will have to re-login to FB as well as my site to see the FB integrations - I'd love to avoid the user ALWAYS having to do two logins. Secondly, forcing the FB.logout when they leave my site kills any active sessions they have at facebook.com, which makes for a bad user experience as they would not 'get' why logging out of my site has anything to do with facebook.com, and will then have to re-signin to facebook.com.
The second option would be that when the user authorizes the FB app, I take their member ID and store that locally and persistently (database). Then, when a user returns to the site and signs in, I check their FB auth status, and if logged in to FB, pull their member ID and check it against the one I have stored locally. If they match, I have the correct user, if not, I do FB.logout and have them sign in to FB. Pros - this should ensure I always have the correct user to the site. Cons - not sure if getting, storing the member ID is feasible.
Any suggestions or pointers to the 'best practice' when it comes to ensuring that the current user is indeed the one associated with the FB account, specifically in this 'shared computing' situation where sessions may overlap?
Thanks
The second option looks to me to be the better choice. You can indeed store the users facebook id. By storing it locally i'm assuming you are talking using a cookie; however storing in a database is just as feasible.
Facebook user id's should be stored with a BIGINT(20) data type - such are the recommendations from facebook.
Taken from the user section of the facebook api refrence :
Looks like they changed their recomendations...