Authenticate with Live Experience for Android

Set up User Authentication and Live Experience Authentication, which are two necessary steps for adding Live Experience to your Android app.

User Authentication refers to confirming that a user who's accessing your application is who they say they are. Your greater organization will determine how that authentication is handled. For instance, you may need to use OAuth authentication through a third-party provider such as Google, Facebook, or Yahoo. In other cases, you may use your own organization's single sign-on (SSO) facilities, some sort of LDAP system, or, during development, you may use a simple username and shared password. In any case, you'll need to design an appropriate user interface workflow along with the supporting backend code.

The following graphic shows the flow if you're using your own SSO/LDAP workflow.

And the following graphic shows the flow if you're using a third party OAuth platform such as Facebook, Google, or Yahoo.

After you authenticate a user, assuming it's required for your application, you then need to handle Live Experience Authentication. To authenticate with Live Experience, you obtain a JSON Web Token (JWT) from Live Experience which you use when opening any connection. You use standard Android Java APIs to communicate with a simple script that you deploy on a web server in your own domain. See Deploy the Sample JWT Script for info about deploying the sample script. While the supplied script is sufficient for development, you'll want to create something more secure for a production environment using the REST call described in Retrieve a JWT Access Token Using the Auth REST Call.

Follow the steps below to obtain a JWT from Live Experience.

1. Deploy the script as described in Deploy the Sample JWT Script.
2. Retrieve the JWT from the script return value using code similar to the following:

   URL url = new URL("https://your-server/cgi-bin/auth.sh");
   String response = new StringBuilder();
   HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
   try {
    BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlConnection.getInputStream()));
    String line = null;
    while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
    response.append(line);
    }
    input.close();
    JSONArray arr = new JSONArray(response);
    JSONObject jObj = arr.getJSONObject(0);
    String access_token = jObj.getString("access_token");
    Log.i("Access token: ", access_token)
    // Pass access_token to the authentication method...
   } finally {
    urlConnection.disconnect();
   }

Results:

After you obtain the JWT access_token, you can use it to authenticate with Live Experience as described in Adding and Configuring the Live Experience Widget for your Android App.