Question

I have an existing application that displays Google Analytics data. Currently, it stores the username and password which I do not like, so I wanted to convert it to use OAuth. I have isolated the authentication method to get the token in hopes that all I would have to do is change this method:

public static string getSessionTokenClientLogin(string email, string password)
{
    //Google analytics requires certain variables to be POSTed
    string postData = "Email=" + email + "&Passwd=" + password;

    //defined - should not channge much
    postData = postData + "&accountType=HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE" + "&service=analytics" + "&source=testcomp-testapp-1";

    ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
    byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData);

    HttpWebRequest myRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin");
    myRequest.Method = "POST";
    myRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    myRequest.ContentLength = data.Length;
    Stream newStream = myRequest.GetRequestStream();

    // Send the data.
    newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
    newStream.Close();

    HttpWebResponse myResponse = (HttpWebResponse)myRequest.GetResponse();
    Stream responseBody = myResponse.GetResponseStream();

    Encoding encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
    StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(responseBody, encode);

    //returned from Google Analytics API
    string response = readStream.ReadToEnd();

    //get the data we need
    string[] auth = response.Split(new string[] { "Auth=" }, StringSplitOptions.None);

    //return it (the authorization token)
    return auth[1];
}

Is there an easy way to convert this to OAuth? I can change the parameters, but I am hoping I do not have to make architectural changes to the rest of my app. Thanks!

Answer 1

You should be able to use the guide found at http://blog.stevienova.com/2008/04/19/oauth-getting-started-with-oauth-in-c-net/ as a basis for writing code to grab an OAuth token. You should use https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthGetRequestToken (as indicated here) instead of http://term.ie/oauth/example/request_token.php , obviously. I don’t think you will need to substantially change your architecture to get this working. Also, you will need to authorize the token before you can use it. I think reading through http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OAuth_ref.html should get you most of what you need.