Forum Discussion

Qrew Trainee

3 years ago

Using the RESTful Quickbase API inside a code page without a Auth Token

I am building a code page that will be connected to a button that a user will click in an app. I am trying to get away from using the Quickbase client that uses the old XML API (var qdb = new QuickBas...

NeilSchneider
2 years ago
You do need to use a token, but the RESTful API has a mechanism for generating a token specific to the users login. This allows you to have a single token that is used by all users on startup, and then generate a token specific to the user and table. This has two advantages:
1) Updates to the DB are assigned to the specific user
2) The rate limits for API calls are based on the individual user.
There is additional overhead for the code. The generated token is for the individual table and the user, and it expires every 5 minutes. So you have to refresh the tokens every 5 minutes.
The instructions are here:
https://developer.quickbase.com/operation/getTempTokenDBID

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Neil Schneider
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NeilSchneider

Qrew Cadet

You do need to use a token, but the RESTful API has a mechanism for generating a token specific to the users login. This allows you to have a single token that is used by all users on startup, and then generate a token specific to the user and table. This has two advantages:
1) Updates to the DB are assigned to the specific user
2) The rate limits for API calls are based on the individual user.
There is additional overhead for the code. The generated token is for the individual table and the user, and it expires every 5 minutes. So you have to refresh the tokens every 5 minutes.
The instructions are here:
https://developer.quickbase.com/operation/getTempTokenDBID

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Neil Schneider
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SteveWellauer1

Qrew Trainee

2 years ago

To anyone else that may be having the same problem. I was able to successfully get a temporary token and use that token on a call without using any credentials or tokens. There are two things that had to be changed in my code in order to facilitate this. The first is I had to change the authorization token from user token to temp token.

  var quickBaseHeadersEverything = {
  'QB-Realm-Hostname': 'company.quickbase.com',
  'Authorization': 'QB-TEMP-TOKEN ' + data.temporaryAuthorization,
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  };

The second issue I had is I tried to get a temporary token for the app DBID and the temporary token call was successful but that temporary token still returned unauthorized for my query request. When I got a temporary token for the table that I was trying to do the query request on it was successful.

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Steve Wellauer
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