Connecting to Dropbox from an App Connect Designer instance in a containerized environment (local connector)

What to consider first

To provide an extra layer of security, Dropbox has added support for the use of refresh tokens with short-lived tokens. This solution is more secure than using the current long-lived tokens. For this reason, Dropbox will retire the creation of long-lived access tokens on the 30 September 2021 resulting in all new tokens being short-lived.

App Connect will continue to support existing accounts using long-lived tokens however after 30 September 2021 if you choose a Basic OAuth authorization method we recommend you use a short-lived access token and refresh token pair.

Connecting to Dropbox

To use a local connector to connect to your Dropbox account, complete the following steps. (For more information about using an App Connect Designer instance in a containerized environment, see Creating and managing flows for an API in App Connect Designer.)

• Expand for steps to generate a long-lived access token.
  1. Sign up for a Dropbox developer account in the Drop box DBX platform.
  2. Click Create apps and complete the form to create an app. The Settings page of the app is displayed.
  3. In the OAuth 2 section, use the Access token expiration menu to select No expiration.
  4. Click Generate.
     
  5. The long-lived access token is displayed and ready for you to use to access your Dropbox account.

• Expand for steps to generate a short-lived access token, refresh token, client ID, and client secret.
  1. Sign up for a Dropbox developer account in the Drop box DBX platform.
  2. Click Create apps and complete the form to create an app. The Settings page of the app is displayed.
  3. In the Status column of the Settings page, the App key and App secret are displayed. The App key is the value that you need for the client ID and the App secret is the value that you need for the client secret in App Connect.
     
  4. In the OAuth 2 section, add a redirect URI. For the purposes of this example, we'll use https://www.google.com/.
     
  5. Click Add.
  6. In the same section, use the Access token expiration menu to select Short-lived.
  7. To generate the access and refresh token pair, you need to generate an authorization code. To do this, construct a Dropbox authorization URL with your application’s client ID and redirect URI (if applicable) in the following format.

     https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=MY_CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=MY_REDIRECT_URI&response_type=code&token_access_type=offline

     For example:

     https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=rt5alrhd93n7ga3&redirect_uri=https://www.google.com/&response_type=code&token_access_type=offline

     Note: Ensure that the redirect URI matches the exact format that you specified in Step 4. For more information about the Dropbox authorization URL, see https://www.dropbox.com/lp/developers/reference/oauth-guide.
  8. Paste the authentication URL into a browser window and click Enter to generate the authorization code. The code is located in the query string, as displayed in the following image.
     
  9. Use an application such as IBM API Connect Test and Monitor or Postman to make a POST OAuth2 token call.

     POST https://api.dropbox.com/1/oauth2/token 

     Update the parameters as specified in the following table:

     Table 2.

     Key	Value
     grant_type	authorization_code
     client_id	The app key retrieved in Step 3
     client_secret	The app secret retrieved in Step 3
     redirect_uri	The redirect URI that you specified in Step 4
     code	The authorization code retrieved in Step 8

     For example:

     
  10. Click Send. The response is displayed with your access token and refresh token.
      

      Note: The refresh token does not expire unless you revoke the short-lived access token.