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Teams Access Token v/s User Access token
I am trying to access the teams folder and all the files and folders inside it for a particular member(not Admin) in my team using java sdk. According to my research and implementation we first need to generate teams access token(only by admin) then that can be used to create a teams client and then I can store this teams access token along with refresh token. Now when any team member signs in using OAuth slow i get the user access token which cannot be used to access the teams folder inside the user account , to achieve that we need to get the member Id of that user from the user access token we just got and then create a client using teamClient.asMember() then we specify the pathroot name space(team folderId) which we can get by listing all team folders from the team client and only after that we can get the team files and folders for a specific user. Please tell me if there is anything i have understood differently in this flow. If this flow is ideal then the teams access token is centralized for all members which is a huge dependency as it is short lived and expires and even if i implement the refresh token mechanism , this flow will need admin manual intervention if the refresh token changes which is possible in many cases. Can you provide a better solution for my this issue?
1 Reply
- DB-Des
Dropbox Engineer
Hi AnkitKumarOjha,
Your understanding of team files interaction is accurate.
Just to clarify a couple of things:
we first need to generate teams access token(only by admin) then that can be used to create a teams client and then I can store this teams access token along with refresh token
An app with team scopes can only be authorized by a team admin. Also, keep in mind that access tokens do expire, whereas refresh tokens do not. Refresh tokens can be securely stored, but access token will need to be regenerated as needed (using the corresponding refresh token).
Now when any team member signs in using OAuth slow i get the user access token which cannot be used to access the teams folder inside the user account
As mentioned above, team members cannot authorize apps with team scopes, unless they are admins.
If this flow is ideal then the teams access token is centralized for all members which is a huge dependency as it is short lived and expires and even if i implement the refresh token mechanism
Keep in mind that when you use one of our official Dropbox SDKs, you do not need to implement all of the logic for the process of regenerating access tokens using a refresh token yourself. The SDK will do most of the work for you.
I hope this information is helpful!
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