Trent's Tech Tips

There are many services out there that offer an OAUTH2 API - whereby you get an access token, associated to your account, and you use that with requests rather than logging in each request. It's a solid design, because for one, you as a user can opt to grant permission to parts of the system, and for another you can easily revoke access to individual applications. One problem? It is fairly unlikely there is a client library built for PL/SQL or APEX use. For instance, Google provides libraries for[ 1 ]: Java JavaScript .NET PHP Python Objective-C Another example, Instagram provides[ 2 ]: Python Ruby It's not too hard to build it in PL/SQL once you understand the flow of OAUTH. I started working on one for Google services, which is hosted over on my GitHub profile. Before you get too far with that though, you may like to test the requests you are attempting to work with. The one's I have seen tend to provide an API test tool, however you may like to create...

Intro Back in Novemeber 2012, I blogged about accessing Google data from APEX - and provided some sample code to getting started. You can find this post here: http://apextips.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/accessing-google-data.html . Over the past little while, I have been (slowly) working on a more modularised API, that can be easily built upon to add support for additional Google services. I have called it PL/GAPI ( G oogle API ). It can be found on github:  https://github.com/trent-/pl-gapi . I hope the wiki on github is straightforward enough to follow in setting this up in your local environment:  https://github.com/trent-/pl-gapi/wiki Services I've started with the following services: Drive Calendar Usage Without going into too much detail (since it's all on the wiki linked earlier), you link to an authorization URL with:  &OWNER..GAPI_AUTH.BEGIN_AUTH?p_scope=&P0_SCOPE.&p_return_app=&APP_ID.&p_return_page=&APP_PAGE_ID.&p...

First I want to point out, the code posted here is in my no means complete, but I believe it provides a good foundation to extend on. To point out some of what is lacking - I am not fetching the refresh token to easily get a new access token without user intervention. I am not handling when the access token is no longer valid. Etc. Also, since a lot of the responses result in JSON, I used the PL/JSON package throughout. I also unfortunately cannot set up a demo on apex.oracle.com due to the obvious limitation of the wallet, and using utl_http. You may know, google has a series of API's that allow you to access your data programatically, to create third party apps. Originally when I looked at the docs, it was using OAuth 1, and I never ended up mastering it. Oleg made a post about the differences here:  http://dbswh.webhop.net/htmldb/f?p=BLOG:READ:0::::ARTICLE:889800346602035 The google docs are here, and they are quite detailed with what to do:  https://developers.google.c...