You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
lalomores
3 years agoHelpful | Level 5
"App Authentication" for App (without tokens). Yet another migration from long lived tokens question
Hi there! I see there have been a lot of questions in the forum on this topic, so I'll just cut to the chase.
My app is made in Meteor (NodeJS) and React. Clients of my app do not need to handle fi...
- 3 years ago
lalomores Just like with long-lived access tokens, the user needs to manually authorize the app once to get the refresh token, which can then be stored and re-used without further manual user interaction. In that example, you can see where the SDK returns the refresh token, which is then set on the client, on this line: https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-js/blob/main/examples/javascript/simple-backend/code_flow_example.js#L38 . You can store and programmatically re-use that 'token.result.refresh_token' value similar to how you would store and programmatically re-use a long-lived access token.
The refresh token is used to programmatically retrieve new short-lived access tokens whenever needed, without the user necessarily present. Those new short-lived access tokens that get retrieved automatically are what are used to then make actual API calls, such as filesListFolder (or usersGetCurrentAccount, as in the example).
Anyway, while Dropbox and the Dropbox API aren't really designed to be used as a CDN, we do recommend using the official SDK(s) whenever possible for accessing the Dropbox API. And using the app folder access type whenever that works for the use case is also a best practice.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Yes, that's correct. The API was designed with the intention that each user would link their own Dropbox account, in order to interact with their own files. While it is technically possible to always connect to just one account for all users, we do not officially support this, for various technical and security reasons.
I'll also pass this along as a request for a "Generate refresh token" option, as well as to clarify the token lifetime in the API v2 Explorer, but I can't promise if or when that might be implemented.
lalomores
3 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Thanks a lot.
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