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Forum Discussion
Invalid OAuth token handling
I'm writing directly against the v2 HTTP API and while testing our login and error handling, I found some unexpected results. If I take a valid OAuth token and corrupt it (change the first character...
- Thanks for the feedback! The 400 error here with the plain text error message is more meant for the developer during development of the app. Generally, your app should be written such that a malformed access token like that wouldn't be able to make it into your released app, but you can catch the 400 and display the error to the user if you want.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThanks for the report! The 500 response to an invalid access token would just be a bug on our side. We'll look into it
The 400 is expected if the supplied string doesn't match the expected pattern for an access token, for example when supplying "abc" as mentioned. You can check the response body for an error message:
Error in call to API function "users/get_current_account": The given OAuth 2 access token is malformed.
You will get a 401 on further calls for a revoked token, for example, if it was a real token revoked via /2/auth/token/revoke:
{"error_summary": "invalid_access_token/...", "error": {".tag": "invalid_access_token"}}
Yes, the 400 response does say that the OAuth2 access token is malformed, but that only helps if someone looks at a log. In code I can detect 401 errors or from_oauth1's 409 "invalid_oauth1_token_info" error, clear the access token, and automatically ask the user to re-authenticate, but if it's just a generic 400 there's no way for me to do that.
- Greg-DBThanks for the feedback! The 400 error here with the plain text error message is more meant for the developer during development of the app. Generally, your app should be written such that a malformed access token like that wouldn't be able to make it into your released app, but you can catch the 400 and display the error to the user if you want.
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