OAuth Refresh Token (Auto-Refresh)

[shurex]

How do we handle access token refreshing when expired?

[kevinohara80]

There is a refreshtoken method you will need to use. Right now, nforce doesn't do any auto-refresh. That's on purpose so users can implement it how they want.

refreshToken() -> https://github.com/kevinohara80/nforce/blob/master/index.js#L178

[jesperfj]

I think it would be super nice if the library supported autorefresh with an option to turn off and handle manually. It is a perennial stumbling block for API newbies

[kevinohara80]

Yeah, I've thought about it. I'd be willing to take a PR but it might take some time for me to get to this if I'm going to write it. It's a tad tricky because it involves trying the request, then caching the original request while refreshing, then returning the original request. That juggling gets complicated when dealing with the stream interfaces.

I'll re-open as a feature request to see if anyone wants to contribute.

[jesperfj]

Yes, it's tricky. Here's a similar implementation in Java that I wrote a while ago.

[kevinohara80]

Thoughts:

• Implement this at the _apiRequest level so that each method doesn't need to implement it. This also helps with the new plugin system (less for users to implement)
• Would need to cache the original request, try it, fail due to expiration, request refresh, then re-try the original request
• This should be a connection configuration option, defaulted to false.

Here is the api for revoking oauth tokens. This will be needed for testing. This should also be a function in nforce.

http://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=remoteaccess_revoke_token.htm&language=en_US

[jesperfj]

:+1: on picking this up!

Not familiar enough with nforce internals to comment on implementation, but sounds about right.

[annoyingmouse]

+1 from me as well

[troygoode]

Hi @kevinohara80, I love this feature. Could we have nforce emit an event when this occurs though, so we can store the updated token for future use?

[troygoode]

(Alternatively, if you were to call self.refreshToken instead of Connection.prototype.refreshToken we could patch that functionality in ourselves.)

[kevinohara80]

@troygoode see the attached commit. I didn't do the event emitter because it's only a single event. Instead, you can provide a function that's called at the end of the refresh. See the readme for an example. This is released in v0.8.0-beta.2

https://github.com/kevinohara80/nforce#access-token-auto-refreshes

[troygoode]

Excellent. That looks great @kevinohara80.

[kevinohara80]

Closing as this was implemented in 0.8.0