Good morning everyone,
I am attempting to pull data from a locally-hosted (in IIS) Web API from a Dynamics 365 plugin. I set up the Web API to use "Individual User Accounts" and made it publicly available. That is working correctly in Postman when I test it as I can get the token fine, then use that token for queries.
My thought was that in the plugin I would request a token using an HttpWebRequest and then use that token for future queries.
My problem is that I cannot call that Web API from a Dynamics 365 plugin at all as I get a security error when I attempt to run the code in the Plugin Registration Tool. Here is what my research has yielded on the topic.
1.) I cannot access the Web API because I have not registered it in/as a "Microsoft Azure Web App." My question on this would be that since we were not planning on using Azure (and I am not sure it fits the safety specifications of this project) "do I have to register it with Azure?"
This quote below is from MSDN on the topic of web service calls in plugins. I'm not sure what I'm missing/violating in my setup.
Web access
Sandboxed plug-ins and custom workflow activities can access the network through the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. This capability provides support for accessing popular web resources like social sites, news feeds, web services, and more. The following web access restrictions apply to this sandbox capability.
Only the HTTP and HTTPS protocols are allowed.
Access to localhost (loopback) is not permitted.
IP addresses cannot be used. You must use a named web address that requires DNS name resolution.
Anonymous authentication is supported and recommended. There is no provision for prompting the logged on user for credentials or saving those credentials.
2.) I have found a lot of people saying that the Plugin Registration Tool will always throw a security error due to my plugin being sandboxed. Does everyone just use trace logs for debugging this?
3.) I have been researching the use of Dynamics 365 Web Hooks but I need this plugin to execute on the "RetrieveMultiple" Event. Is that something I can do with D365 Web Hooks?
Thank you all so much for your help. Have a great day.
Your webservice should have a public accessible https-URL, so dynamics 365 can access it from anywhere. You should secure your webservice by a login mechanismn.
As testing, security and configuration advice you should not add url, username and password in your plugin code, instead make it configurable in a crm record. So you can develop and test on a different webservice instance and your production instance connects to the right webservice without changing the code before deployment.
I am developing cordova based hybrid mobile apps targeted for android and iOS smartphones.
Usecase: The application authenticate user and then would be accessing Google Calendar API's, and finally display user events on the app.
Note: I will be Using 3-legged OAuth and Google Data APIs without the client libraries.
Question
The Cordova-enabled WebView provides the application with its entire user interface, so what should be the application type in this case?
Since everything is going inside webview, so Shall I choose "Web Application"?
OR
Do I need to create seperate Applications type for Android and iOS
seperately?
Or can iOS Application Type work for both Android and iOS?
Please suggest what should be the proper approach to choose application type in this case.
Thanks!
It depends on how your app is setup. If you plan on handling all of the OAUTH processing on a backend server then you can use the Web application type, and you can have all the OAUTH work offloaded to the backend server.
If you do not have a backend server and will do all OAUTH processing on the user's device, then you should create both an iOS and Android client ID. For example:
https://github.com/EddyVerbruggen/cordova-plugin-googleplus
This plugin's documentation shows the creation of both an iOS and Android client ID to enable Google Sign In on a Cordova app.
I would like to develop a system that can help any developer to create an application based to my API.
My problem is authentication.
I have see (for example) as work google with your services; I would like create an system of oauth (private) such as google (concept) that an developer, after sign to my portal, get APP ID and APP SECRET.
When developer self create these credentials, can use for call API based to https.
My API are developed by nodejs and express system.
I say which way is more stable for create an system robust for this scenario.
Thanks for any support. Any idea is appreciate
You can try http://passportjs.org/, it can work as a middleware with express.
Is there a way to test my App service api app & Authentication using tool such as Fiddler? I used to be able to do this for Mobile Service by passing the token in the request header (x-zumo-auth). But now with App Service, it's no longer working or available.
Reason I ask is that my client won't be limited to those platform or will they be developed using those languages/SDK so I need a way to make REST API calls.
I am not sure about Fiddler, but I have used the Google Chrome Postman extension to do this kind of thing before and it works really well. It is free and you can get it from here (you'll need chrome installed): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman/fhbjgbiflinjbdggehcddcbncdddomop
I have the following scenario:
1.- A web api project in Azure, that I want to secure using Azure AD (I don't mind Token, cookie, whatever, as far as it meets the entire scenario)
2.- An Azure web site in asp.net MVC, also secured by Azure AD. This website has to call the web api controller with SSO (I'm using same Azure AD in the entire scenario)
3.- Some JavaScript code running in a page in SharePoint Online, also calling the web api controller in any secure way (The Office 365 tenant is also using same Azure AD). If you don't know about SharePoint, let's say I have an SPA project where I can only use Javascript and html (no server side code).
Following some of the MS Azure AD samples and some blogs from Vittorio Bertocci I'm able to get the points 1 and 2 working fine, using OWIN and Oppen ID connect. However, seems impossible to achieve point 3. As I'm inside a page in SharePoint Online, I can only use javascript, and not any server side code. I'd like to get a valid token for the current user, that is already logged in SP, and remember that SP uses same Azure AD that web api site.
Can I call the Azure AD and get a valid token, just from client code?
I'm open to any possible solution. I can do whatever in the web api project. If you are thinking in a SharePoint app with an appPart, and the appPart calls the web api from server side code, I agree that will work, but it's an option that is not allowed at the moment :(
Many thanks.
I have similar needs. While waiting for a Microsoft sponsored solution we’re working on the following approach.
3) in Your solution (i.e. HTML page with JavaScript, hosted in SharePoint Online and running in Browser) will call Services in 1) (i.e. Web Api Service layer in Azure).
In Our case we only want to validate that the calls made from SharePoint Online (via users browser, i.e. JavaScript) originate from a correct Office 365 / SharePoint Online user in our tenant.
We are opting out of using the App Model as we only want some simple HTML / JavaScript pages in our Intranet and don’t want App Webs. The Web Api server side code is kind of our “Web Part” code behind.
Change to the solution after trying it out and having workable code:
The auth cookies are ReadOnly and cannot be used. Instead we have registered one metod in our service layer as App in SharePoint Online (via appregnew.aspx). That methods url (e.g. https://cloudservice.customer.com/api/authentication/token) is registered as App start page in the app manifest and is deployed to a site Collection.
Now we can call our App via https://customer.sharepoint.com/sites/devassets/_layouts/15/appredirect.aspx?instance_id={GUID} i a jQuery ajax call and parse the result. AppRedirect sends the correct SPAuthToken which we use in our service endpoint (i.e. App start page) to call back to SharePoint and check context.Web.CurrentUser. User email is then stored in Table Storage with a generated Token which we send back to the caller (i.e. the jQuery ajax call to app redirect).
That token is then used in all other service layer calls in order to be sure of who is calling our service layer and in some cases perform authorization in our service layer.
Note, You can use the same approach in order to store Refresh and AccessToken in your client and provide that in all calls to your service from your client and use those tokens in order to do App Calls back to SharePoint. This enables HTML UI in SharePoint host webs and server code using user context in Azure service layer.
To follow up, ADAL.js has recently been released, and the ability to use CORS with O365 APIs was recently added, enabling a scenario for script clients to communicate with services protected by Azure AD, such as your Web API.
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/adal-js-cors-with-o365-apis-files-sharepoint
UPDATE 2018:
This is now supported by SharePoint Online and the SPFx development model, and officially documented, for instance here
Consume enterprise APIs secured with Azure AD in SharePoint Framework
Being said that the work done meanwhile by Vittorio, Kirk, and their teams, but extending that also to Andrew that has delivered great samples, is awesome; that doesn't really fully reply the original question because one of the requirements is to don't run the component as Add-in Part.
If you try to use ADAL JS (which starts its own OAuth flow) hosting that directly in a SP page, that's not going to work, or anyway you can expect a weird behavior for the user (cause of client redirects happening on the browser).
The solution proposed by Peter Karpinski is interesting, and will work matching the requirements in the original question, but requires quite some complexity and additional management/resources.
This recent article provides an alternative solution similar to Peter's one, but requiring less 'extras' and somewhat simpler, also reusing user's SP identity.
Consuming Azure Hosted Web API from SharePoint Online using JavaScript and Office 365 identities
and doesn't either require the use of ADAL on the client side and the implementation of custom security provider / token issuer on the server side.
The identity (cookie) will be passed via properly handling CORS (documentation) on both sides.
However, as you can read in my comments to that blog, this won't work normally with IE due to its security zone implementation. You'll have to be sure you have control on IE security zones on the clients, or have an alternative solution specific for IE.
As of today AAD does not support the OAuth2 implicit flow (or OpenId Connect variants) hence you can't obtain a token from AAD using a user-agent (browser), regardless of whether you hit the wire handcrafting the protocol or using a library.
However keep an eye on future announcements, as this is an important scenario for us!
HTH
Cheers,
V.
update we now support the implicit flow on our server, and we released a library for helping you consume the new feature: http://www.cloudidentity.com/blog/2015/02/19/introducing-adal-js-v1/
Thank youi for r your patience!
The fact that you say you can use only HTML/JS let me guess you're having a SharePoint-hosted App.
Azure AD Authentication Library (ADAL) doesn't provide yet in this moment support for HTML5.
I've been looking since a while (almost one year) on how to implement something as you say; but I couldn't find any working solution, which doesn't make use also of some 'code-behind'.
I'd suggest you then to move to a Provider-hosted App, where you'll be able to have some C# code, and make use of ADAL to retrieve and reuse the OAuth token.
Also, I think is worth to look at this documentation page:
Choose patterns for developing and hosting your app for SharePoint
at section Match your hosting pattern with your development goals
thanks for your help.
Well, it's not a SP-Hosted App, but it's same scenario. It's just a SP page in SP Online, so I can only use JS code like in a SP-hosted app.
As I said in my question, I agree the Provider hosted app is likely the right (or at least, the unique) solution, but that means to build and app, deploy it, and add teh appPart manually to the page (is not easy to package in a WSP). So, this solution is quite hard, when you only want to make some AJAX calls and show some data.
However, after all that I've seen, I think we can't do anything else. I'm gonna wait some more days to see if someone know any weird workarround that could work, and if not, I'll mark your answer as valid.
Thanks again!