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How to Access Outreach APIs

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Purpose

The purpose of this article is to provide direction to internal and external developers using Outreach APIs for accessing Outreach data and its various platform capabilities. This new experience provides developers self-serve access for generating credentials in order to identify their app during API calls and select the scope of data that they want their extension to receive. 

Intended Audience

  • Customer Product & Engineering Teams
  • 3rd Party Partner Developers 
  • Outreach Admins

Key functions of the feature:

The API access tab allows developers to connect their custom apps to Outreach API to use it alongside with its platform capabilities.

The API access tab can be found in the Outreach settings under Integrations and in the app editing screen. To locate it in the app editing screen, navigate from Settings -> Integrations -> Your Apps -> Click on the app you desire to connect to Outreach API -> Set-up -> API access.

Users are now able to generate OAuth client ID and Client secret to authorize and identify their app during API calls. After a user successfully authorizes an application, the authorization server will redirect the user back to the application with an access token in the URL.

There is a pair of OAuth credentials generated for each Outreach app enabled with Outreach API: 

  • Development client credentials
  • Production client credentials

By having two sets of credentials, customers benefit from a quick self-service setup to bootstrap the development and testing without undermining the trust of their Outreach users. 

It is expected that developers of third-party integration with Outreach will use Development client credentials while testing their solution and only include the  Production client ID in the URLs to users of the integration once it is tested and the Outreach app is published.

When a non-developer user clicks an OAuth flow URL that uses 'Development client' credentials, the user will see a warning that they should only authorize the application  if they trust the developer/source of the URL they clicked:
Screen_Shot_2022-10-28_at_3.43.21_PM.png

In order to initiate the OAuth flow, a partner must acquire a set of OAuth credentials ( client_id + client_secret), and register its parameters, including:

  •  redirect_urls(the authorization server will redirect the user back to the application with access token in the URL)
  •  scopes(data to forward to this app)

API Access

  1. Access the Outreach Platform. 
  2. Go to Settings.
  3. Click on the Integration tab.
  4. Go to Your apps.
  5. Click on the app you want to access the API with.
  6. Choose the API access tab.
  7. Toggle the switch to see the content. 

Additional Resources: 

  • For all documentation on the developers experience, APIs and Extensibility SDK, visit here. 

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