I am building a react site where users can purchase a "day", "weekly" or "monthly" pass for the content on the page. I only want to allow them access for a day if they purchase a day pass. Same for weekly and monthly. I am using JWT to keep users logged in. I have no idea how to create the functionality to verify if they should still have access or not. Would love some help. I am also using redux if that helps.
You need to start thinking about Authentication and Authorization separately. Your JWTs are (hopefully) performing the Authentication duty. The "limited access" you're asking about are the concern of Authorization. In other words: now that you know who this user is, what are they allowed to do?
You need to map your JWTs to some form of internal user id, and then determine if they can or cannot access the requested resource/endpoint/etc.
For example, you might allow all users to GET from /jobs to view the listing of job postings, but if they try to POST to /apply for a job, you verify that they are a "premium" user, with time remaining on their paid subscription.
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I am working on a integration with Salesforce using REST APIs and, as part of the project, I need to send updates to Salesforce and these updates are not user triggered, they are system triggered.
Because of that, what I expect to see on Salesforce Field History is not a user name but the name of our Connected App (the app that made the update).
What I see today is the user name because the way the integration was made initially using OAuth Authorization Code flow.
To change that part of the project, I followed the link (OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer Flow for Server-to-Server Integration): https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.remoteaccess_oauth_flows.htm&type=5
Making that, I was expeting to generate a token for a System, not for a User, but that's not what happened: when I used the token generate from the JWT Bearer Flow and ran the update, the Field History still shows the user name.
What could I do then?
Which are the options in Salesforce to achieve the behavior I'm expecting?
The most important, in my opinion, is to have a Token for our system, not for a user.
Thanks!
Everybody is an user in Salesforce. Even if you access unauthenticated pages (some contact us form? case or lead capture) - it gets tracked under special Guest User.
It sounds stupid but gives you unified interface to control permissions (Profiles/Permission sets). You want guests to access only FAQ articles and make cases? Sure thing, do it in profile, don't get paranoid about people trying to guess right URLs. You think an app was hacked? You can terminate the session just like any other "user". Want to allow login only in certain hours and from certain IP? Sure.
An app connecting with JWT will still need username (main difference being it's "just" certificate for signing the request instead of password).
Your best bet is to create dedicated "Mr System", "SystemX integration" account. It sounds like waste of license but in the long run saves you questions "why did you edit my account at 1 am" and you could even use it as backup account if you use SSO and it ever fails...
I have tried multiple times to get this to work, but I haven't figured it out yet, so I'm asking in here, hoping that someone will be able to help me out.
I am using Atlassian's Bitbucket, Jira and Bamboo and they're all synced with an AD. At the moment I am using my AD user to retrieve all the other users. It works, but it's not optimal, as the password expires every three months, and I have to change the LDAP user login info on all three applications. We have ordered a Service User, where the password doesn't expire, but the problem is that the Service User is in another group.
The picture below shows how the AD is set up. My Service User is in a group called Special Users. I would like to use this user as the login user in the settings. This way I would never have to think about changing password, when my AD password expires.
I would then like to retrieve all the users from the "Normal Users" group.
Let me know if more information is needed.
Thanks.
You could also add multiple user directories pointing to different parts of your Active Directory.
Jira has an internal Crowd out of the box.
You may let Jira connect to User directory and let all other application use Jira for authintication.
This would save time by only updating your LDAP password every 3 months on 1 application and reflected on all 3 applications
I am new to Salesforce, but am an experienced developer. I am provided a link to a Salesforce report, which mostly has the right filters (query). I would like to use an REST API to pull that information as CSV or JSON so that I can do further processing on it.
Here are my questions:
Do I need special permissions to make API calls? What are they?
Do I need to create an "app" with client-key & secret? Does my admin need to grant me permission for this too?
There are a lot of REST APIs from Salesforce, which one do I need to get the info from the report? Analytics?
How do I authenticate in code?
You'd have to work with the System Administrator on the security pieces. Anybody who knows how the company works, can all users see everything, is there Single Sign-On in place, how likely is the report to change...
You will need an user account to pull the data. You need to decide if it'll be some "system account" (you know username and password and have them stored in your app) or can it run for any user in this org. It might not matter much but reports are "fun". If there will be data visibility issues 6 months from now, you'll be asked to make sure the report shows only French data to French users etc... you can make it in report filters or have multiple reports - or you can just use current users access and then it's the sysadmin that has to set the sharing rules right. (would you ever think about packaging what you did and reusing in another SF instance? Making a mobile app out of it? Things like that, they may sound stupid now but will help you decide on best path)
The user (whether it'll be system account or human) needs Profile permissions like "API Enabled" + whatever else you'd need normally ("Run Reports" etc). If you're leaning towards doing it with system user - you might want to look at Password Policies and maybe set password to Never Expires. Now this is bit dangerous so there would be other things you might want to read up about: "API only user" (can't login to website), maybe even locking down the account so it can login only from certain IP ranges or at certain times when the job's supposed to be scheduled...
Connected App and OAUth2 stuff - it's a good idea to create one, yes. Technically you don't have to, you could use SOAP API to call login, get session id... But it's bit weak, OAuth2 would give you more control over security. If you have sandboxes - there's little-known trick. You can make connected app in production (or even totally unrelated Developer Edition) and use client id & secret from it to login to sandboxes. If you create app in sandbox and you refresh it - keys stop working.
(back to security piece - in connected app you can let any user allow/deny access or sysadmin would allow only say these 3 users to connect, "pre-authorize". Could be handy)
Login - there are few REST API ways to login. Depends on your decision. if you have 1 dedicated user you'll probably go with "web server flow". I've added example https://stackoverflow.com/a/56034159/313628 if you don't have a ready SF connection library in your programming language.
If you'll let users login with their own credentials there will be typical OAuth "dance" of going to the target page (Google login, LinkedIn, Twitter...) and back to your app on success. This even works if client has Single Sign-On enabled. Or you could let people type in their username and pass into your app but that's not a great solution.
Pull the actual report already
Once you have session id. Official way would be to use Reporting API, for example https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_analytics.meta/api_analytics/sforce_analytics_rest_api_get_reportdata.htm
A quick & dirty and officially not supported thing is to mimic what happens when user clicks the report export in UI. Craft a GET request with right cookie and you're golden. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/57745683/313628. No idea if this will work if you went with dedicated account and "API access only" permission.
For a calendar app, I want to sync users calendars (events) to my database. For now, I need title, start, end, recurrence and reminders/alerts. I am thinking, I will get these information from app and store it to a database. To make things easy (implementing recurrence maybe hard), I thought of using a hidden Google Calendar account on the server as a database.
Server will use a "hidden" Google Calendar account
App (iOS) will get calendar information from user's iCal via EventKit
Passes server this information which is saved to Google Calendar
So 1 user calendar becomes 1 hidden google calendar
But I think I might encounter some problems with API limits?
I might need to re-authenticate to refresh the access token? Is there a token I do not have to refresh?
Is the limit on the number of calendar I can have 10,000? What if I need more? Isit even possible? Or is it 10,000 for "a short period of time".
Is this possible? Or is the only option a self build system.
The quota for the Google calendar API is Queries per day 1,000,000 if you go over that you can always request additional quota as far as I know it doesn't cost anything to extend your quota.
Once you have authentication to a user Google calendar account you will receive a refresh token. The refresh token can be used to gain a new access token when ever you need to access it. Refresh tokens don't expire unless a user removes your access.
How to know if a user is currently logged-in in your Google App Engine application?
The application allow its users to browse other users' profile. If the viewed profile is also using or logged-in in the application, i want a notification that the viewed profile is online.
How to achieve this requirements?
If you are managing user profiles, you know when a user logs in. At the end of the login process, just save the user's log-in information in the memcache somehow.
You will later be able to check if a user is logged-in just by searching for him in your memcache.
This way is easy to catch and track the connection events, but you also have to react when a user disconnects, to have your list up to date. To achieve this, you can use a Channel. See the google documentation.
You could, as Gaël suggests, use the Channel API to track this, but it's probably overkill. If you wanted to go that route, just listen for the connected & disconnected messages, and update a field in the db that indicates that the user is signed in.
A less expensive route might be to just update a field in your user's record that's something like "last time this user requested a page." If it's been more than n minutes since the last time the user requested a page, assume they're signed out. Indeed, you could even do this in memcache with a map from userid to last access time.
It comes down to what you want to do with the "signed in" information: if you just want to give a general sense of whether a user's around, or how many users are online, using the datastore or memcache solution is probably good. On the other hand, if you want to reflect the user's presence so they can respond to eg. IMs, then you'll probably want the Channel API anyway so you can immediately deliver messages to them.