Question

I have been working with Google-bigquery and JavaScript for a little time now, after getting some help here, something i realised is that the you require your Google login details associated with the project to authorise and achieve what your trying to do.

What i am trying to achieve:-
Allow users to visit my page, and view the data. For example i may show some public data based on weather forecast, so i do not require any users authentication,

Currently for research & development purposed i am using I am using OAuth 2.0 for Web Server Applications, i want to get rid of this as we don’t need any user data, apart from having my project client-id email-id etc…

I have read on OAuth 2.0 for Server to Server Applications, and there don’t seem to be any support for JavaScript so the end-user doesn’t have to be involved.

Is there any solution to this or a safe quick fix, i have tried changing the config code from this sample to see what happens but no luck –

var config = {
            'client_id' : 'xxxxxxxxxxx.apps.googleusercontent.com',
            "iss" : "[e-mail]",
            "scope" : "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/bigquery",
            "aud" : "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token",
            "exp" : 1328554385,
            "iat" : 1328550785
        };

What am i missing in here.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice, i have been struggling for a very loong time with this.

Answer 1

Because there is no way to hide a client secret in client-side JavaScript code, there is no way to authorize a client-side JavaScript application to use BigQuery via a server-to-server OAuth flow.

The only solution in this case is to use a server side proxy for your API calls from the JavaScript application. Here’s a snippet below of how you could proxy query calls via AppEngine (note: the code below is open to any user, it does do any check to make sure the calls are being run through your particular JavaScript client).

import httplib2

from apiclient.discovery import build
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp.util import run_wsgi_app
from oauth2client.appengine import AppAssertionCredentials

# BigQuery API Settings
SCOPE = 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/bigquery'
PROJECT_ID = 'XXXXXXXXXX' # REPLACE WITH YOUR Project ID

# Create a new API service for interacting with BigQuery
credentials = AppAssertionCredentials(scope=SCOPE)
http = credentials.authorize(httplib2.Http())
bigquery_service = build('bigquery', 'v2', http=http)


class StartQueryHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
  def post(self):
    query_string = self.request.get('query')
    jobCollection = bigquery_service.jobs()
    jobData = {
      'configuration': {
        'query': {
          'query': query_string,
        }
      }
    }
    try:
      insertResponse = jobCollection.insert(projectId=PROJECT_ID,
                                            body=jobData).execute()
      self.response.headers.add_header('content-type',
                                       'application/json',
                                       charset='utf-8')
      self.response.out.write(insertResponse)
    except:
      self.response.out.write('Error connecting to the BigQuery API')


class CheckQueryHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
  def get(self, job_id):
    query_job = bigquery_service.jobs()
    try:
      queryReply = query_job.getQueryResults(projectId=PROJECT_ID,
                                             jobId=job_id).execute()
      self.response.headers.add_header('content-type',
                                       'application/json',
                                       charset='utf-8')
      self.response.out.write(queryReply)
    except:
      self.response.out.write('Error connecting to the BigQuery API')


application = webapp.WSGIApplication(
                                     [('/startquery(.*)', StartQueryHandler),
                                     ('/checkquery/(.*)', CheckQueryHandler)],
                                     debug=True)

def main():
  run_wsgi_app(application)

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()