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
devid13
4 years agoExplorer | Level 4
How to get Access Token for background process without any user integractions?
Hi Team,
We are doing dropbox integration to upload files from salesforce to dropbox. To do this we are doing background processing and to get access token we always use "Long-lived" from the ...
Greg-DB
4 years agoDropbox Staff
Getting an access token always requires some sort of user interaction initially, either via the "Generate" button on the app's page on the App Console (when just getting an access token for the app owner's account), or via the OAuth app authorization flow (which can be used for any arbitrary user, not just the app owner).
In either case, once the access token is retrieved, the app can store and re-use it without further manual user interaction.
Long-lived access tokens don't expire, so they can be stored and re-used indefinitely (unless/until revoked). Short-lived access tokens expire after four hours though.
With the new system of short-lived access tokens and optional refresh tokens, in order to maintain long-term access without further manual user interaction, the app would need to request "offline" access, to get and store a refresh token, in addition to the short-lived access token. A refresh token allows the app to retrieve new short-lived access tokens on demand, whenever needed, without further manual user interaction. The "Generate" button does not currently offer the ability to retrieve refresh tokens, so you'd need to use and implement the OAuth flow in order to get that. You can find information on how that works in the OAuth Guide and authorization documentation. This blog post may also be helpful if you haven't already seen it.
- DuraUser4 years agoNew member | Level 2
Hi Greg/Team,
In your response you mentioned that we can use refresh token to get short lived access tokens without further manual interaction. How long can we keep using the refresh token. Is there a time limit on when Refresh token also expires?
"With the new system of short-lived access tokens and optional refresh tokens, in order to maintain long-term access without further manual user interaction, the app would need to request "offline" access, to get and store a refresh token, in addition to the short-lived access token"
About Dropbox API Support & Feedback
Find help with the Dropbox API from other developers.
5,910 PostsLatest Activity: 3 days agoIf you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.
For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!