How do I authenticate/authorize myself to Quickbooks API?

Question

I'd like to reach out to Quickbooks within my application to create some invoices. I can do this when I go generate a temporary AccessToken and AccessTokenSecret but those expire. How can I reliably and repeatedly make calls to the Quickbooks API?

Note: The "user" accessing the data from my application can be considered "system". I am using the Quickbooks API to simply streamline/automate a personal workflow.

string accessToken = "temporaryAccessToken";  //this expires
string accessTokenSecret = "temporaryAccessTokenSecret";  //this expires
string consumerKey = "myConsumerKey";
string consumerSecret = "myConsumerSecret";

m_OAuthRequestValidator = new OAuthRequestValidator(
accessToken, accessTokenSecret, consumerKey, consumerSecret);

string appToken = "myAppToken";
string companyID = "myCompanyID";
ServiceContext context = new ServiceContext(appToken, companyID, IntuitServicesType.QBD, m_OAuthRequestValidator);

DataService service = new DataService(context);

var customer = new Customer();
customer.GivenName = "Scout";
customer.FamilyName = "Berman";

Customer resultCustomer = service.Add(customer) as Customer;

Answer 1

This is documented in detail in Intuit's documentation.

You basically have two options:

1. If you're building a SaaS app:

Read the section about implementing OAuth in your application. It's vanilla OAuth with a couple of button widgets added to push Intuit's brand on people.

Basically, you embed a javascript script tag in your header which pulls in Intuit's Javascript libraries, add a call to Intuit's Javascript setup() method, and put a custom HTML tag in your web page. This gets you a nice pretty "Connect to QuickBooks" button.

When you click that button, it kicks off a standard OAuth process which gets you a long-lived (6 months) access token. Store the tokens in your app so that you can make calls at any time using these OAuth tokens.

2. If you're just building a one-off for your personal use:

You can get a 6-month token by using Intuit's playground tool:

• https://appcenter.intuit.com/Playground/OAuth/IA

In either situation:

You can make a REST API call to renew the token within 30 days of it's expiration date (e.g. you can just keep extending it to keep it valid forever and ever).