Question

I have read the documentation, examples and tutorials of how to use the Google API, I have a mini-app running already that shows your latest activities and information, but I use sessions to store the token.

My question is, how can I store and retrieve the token from the database so that when a user (who has already registered) clicks “login”, it can use the API right away without repeated authorization? Note that I used the example as a starting point for my mini-app.

Here’s a code snippet:

$client = new apiClient();
$client->setApplicationName(APP_NAME);
$client->setClientId(CLIENT_ID);
$client->setClientSecret(CLIENT_SECRET);
$client->setRedirectUri(REDIRECT_URL);
$client->setDeveloperKey(DEV_KEY);

$plus = new apiPlusService($client);
$google_userinfo = new apiOauth2Service($client);

$message = "";

// In a real application this would be stored in a database, and not in the session!
if (isset($_SESSION['token']))
  $client->setAccessToken($_SESSION['token']);

$_SESSION['token'] = $client->getAccessToken();

if (isset($_GET['code'])) {
   $client->authenticate();
  // In a real application this would be stored in a database, and not in the session!
  $_SESSION['token'] = $client->getAccessToken();
  header('Location: http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
}
...
 //Somewhere here, I added a function that ties $_SESSION['token'] to the user's info.
...
<form action="" method="post" id="form1" name="form1">
   <fieldset>
      <div id="main-url-section" style="width: 50%;margin: 0px auto;text-align: center;">
         <?php
            $authUrl = $client->createAuthUrl();
            print "<p><a class='login' href='$authUrl'>Log me in!</a></p>";
         ?>                                 
      </div>
    </fieldset>
</form>

Thank you so much for the help!

Regards,

John

Answer 1

If you’d like Google to skip the authorization prompt for people who have already authorized your application, add this code in your configuration block at the top:

$client->setAccessType("online");
$client-> setApprovalPrompt("auto");

There’s one catch with this solution: you will not receive a refresh token when you complete your OAuth dance. This means that your users will be redirected to Google’s authentication service every time their access token expires in order to fetch a new one. This will happen roughly every hour.

Background Info

By default the PHP client library is configured to provide offline access. You can see this in the source code. When this mode is enabled the OAuth flow will yield a refresh token that can be used to request new access tokens as needed. You may not even notice this happening. The PHP client library takes care of most of this for you.

This refresh token comes at a cost, though. You are responsible for storing it. If you lose it, your user must re-authorize your application for you to be issued another one. The way you store it depends a lot on the details of your implementation. Session data is a reasonable way to do this if you can make it durable enough.