Sessions management

An important part of any Podio API integration is managing your authentication tokens. You can avoid hitting rate limits and make your integration faster by storing authentication tokens and thus avoid having to re-authenticate every time your page runs.

What is a session manager

When you initialize the Podio class you can choose to pass in an object of a class that implements IAuthStore interface. This IAuthStore handles storing and retrieving access tokens through a unified interface. For example if SessionAuthStore class in an implementation of IAuthStore Interface, you would initialize your Podio class as:

var sessionAuthStore = new SessionAuthStore();

var podio = new Podio(clientId, clientSecret, sessionAuthStore);

if(podio.IsAuthenticated())
{
    // An existing authentication is found by AuthStore
    // No need to re-authenticate
}
else
{
    // No authentication found in session manager.
    // You must re-authenticate here.
}

If you use an AuthStore your authentication tokens will automatically be stored/updated when ever authentication or refresh of token happends and automatically retrieved when you initialize Podio class.

Writing your own session manager

Writing a AuthStore is straight-forward. You need to create a new class that implements IAuthStore interface.

The Get method

The Get method should retrieve an existing authentication when called. It should return a PodioOAuth object in all cases. Return an empty PodioOAuth object if no existing authentication could be found.

Note: Get method is not available in async version. You can assign PodioOAuth object manually like this

The Set method

The Set method should store a PodioOAuth object when called. It has a parameters, podioOAuth, which holds the current PodioOAuth object.

Example: Store access tokens in browser session cookie

This is a simple example meant for a web application. It stores the authentication data in a HttpContext.Current.Session variable. This avoid having to re-authenticate each time a page is refreshed. AuthStore implementation using Session will not work in async version of API Client because HttpContext.Current will not be available in a seperate thread.

using System.Web;

namespace PodioAPI.Utils.Authentication
{
    public class SessionAuthStore: IAuthStore
    {
        //Get PodioOAuth object from session, if present.
        public PodioOAuth Get()
        {
            // Check if we have a stored session
            if (HttpContext.Current.Session != null && HttpContext.Current.Session["PodioOAuth"] != null)
                return HttpContext.Current.Session["PodioOAuth"] as PodioOAuth; // We have a session, return it
            else
                return new PodioOAuth(); // Else return an empty object
        }
        
        //Store the PodioOAuth object in the session
        public void Set(PodioOAuth podioOAuth)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Session["PodioOAuth"] = podioOAuth;
        }
    }
}

See these exam

using PodioAPI;
using PodioAPI.Utils.Authentication;

var sessionAuthStore = new SessionAuthStore();
var podio = new Podio(ClientID, ClientID, sessionAuthStore);

if(!podio.IsAuthenticated())
{
    // No authentication found in AuthStore.
    // You must re-authenticate here.

    podio.AuthenticateWithApp(appId, appToken);
}

//Api calls here