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Forum Discussion
Unable to get long lived access tokens.
Hello there!
I'm trying to get an access token that doesn't expire. A long-lived access token. For now, when I generated an access token from the App Console, the session will expire after x ho...
Take a look on https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Discuss-Dropbox-Developer-API/Need-Permanant-Access-token-for-drop-box/td-p/583956 😉
In short - there is no more long lived access token and you should add refresh token in your code.
Hope this helps.
I have been using the long lived access token you can request when you setup your app, and have that embedded in my app. I use it to send a "synchronizing" file to DB whenever I make changes. I don't need to re-authenticate. My question is, if I know allow users to do the same thing, they will need to authenticate and I will get a short lived AT and a refresh AT. How much additional latency will they experience converting the AT from refresh to short lived? Currently the total latency to connect to DB and upload a file from my app is < 1/2 second, or barely noticeable. Will all of the "re-allocation" steps add significantly to this.
Thank you.
Hi marksmithhfx,
Your question is very generic, so it's difficult to receive exact answer. Additional time consumption is on refresh only. Since data size transferred is relatively negligible, establishing secure connection gets primary weight. In other words additional time depends on your connection latency more than the connection speed.
Other point you should consider, on evaluation, is usage time profile - i.e. how often, relatively, refresh will take on. Let's recall additional time will be added on refresh only, so if your usage profile predispose many calls in a 4 hours time frame, weight of the refresh will be negligible. If your calls bring up on intervals bigger than 4 hours then the relative weight might be bigger (on every calls burst - one refresh). Once the refresh take place, no difference can be expected for rest of calls - they are the same (no additional delay per call).
The best way to figure out exact answer in your particular conditions is... the check. 😉 Most probably it will be negligible.
Good luck.
Thanks. Great answer, and very reassuring. I will give it a go.
Well, as indicated in my previous response I have been "giving this a go" but with only partial success.
When I send my app key, app secret, scopes, port and “offline” to https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize
I get back the following:
Array
.. [account_id] => dbid:AAB27TU-12HrF0rn….
.. [refresh_token] => 29hxFtf-fnoAAAAAAAAAAQe….
.. [expires_in] => 14400
.. [uid] => 16196036
.. [scope] => account_info.read files.content.read files.content.write files.metadata….
.. [access_token] => sl.BFo00immyYa18QPnbABlmng….
.. [token_type] => bearer
Which is all well and good because what I want is a refresh token that I can use to request a sl. access token when the current one expires. This should also demonstrate that I know how to send an app key, secret, port and token_access_type to the URL provided.
However, when I send my grant type, refresh_token, app key and secret to https://api.dropbox.com/oauth2/token like it suggests in the guidance below (from the Developers guidelines) I always get an Error 404 page not found. I’ve also tried sending to https://api.dropboxapi.com/oauth2/token but get the same result. What am I doing wrong?
curl https://api.dropbox.com/oauth2/token \
-d grant_type=refresh_token \
-d refresh_token=<REFRESH_TOKEN> \
-u <APP_KEY>:<APP_SECRET>BTW, both end points (api.dropbox.com and api.dropboxapi.com) are given in the docs. I tried them both. Both were 404.
Thanks
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
marksmithhfx Is that the exact code you're running? It looks correct, and it does work for me when I plug in my values. There may be something about how your client is formatting the request causing it to fail. Perhaps you can share the actual request/response you're getting (just redacting the sensitive values) so I can take a look.
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