CC API Integration with Salesforce

[ChrisC763]

Greetings,

We are in the planning stages of developing an integration between CC and Salesforce Enterprise.  In researching how your API works, we see it uses oAuth2 for acquiring an Access Key, which then can be used to obtain a Refresh Key. However, Salesforce does not seem to support oAuth2 to a third party website, meaning we can't call an external browser from within Salesforce to obtain the Access Key.  I'm sure I'm not the first person to inquire about CC integration from within Salesforce.  We have a rather specific way we'd like to handle the integration, so we are not really looking for a "canned" solution.  We do have both a Client ID and a Secret ID.  What advise/guidance can you offer as far as obtaining the Access Key from within Salesforce?

Thanks,

Chris C.

[John__B]

Hello ChrisC763,

Thank you for reaching out to Constant Contact API Developer Support. My team is here to assist outside software developers with questions about building into Constant Contact's API.

Each of our available OAuth2 authorization flows requires the use of a browser window for a user to grant access to an application for their Constant Contact account through a permission request screen, however, you should only need to do this once as after access has been granted, your application can maintain account access through the use of Refresh Tokens. Our Access Tokens have a lifespan of 24 hours and will need to be refreshed with a Refresh Token once they expire. Our Refresh Tokens will only expire after 180 days if never used.

Since you mentioned that Salesforce is unable to open an external browser window, I would recommend looking into our Device authorization flow, which doesn’t use redirects or the client secret. Instead, a verification URI is returned in the response for the authorization request, which can be passed to a device that does have access to a browser. I’m including documentation for this authorization flow below.

OAuth2 Device Flow:

https://developer.constantcontact.com/api_guide/device_flow.html

Please have a look and let us know if you have any other questions!

Regards,

[ChrisC763 · Accepted solution]

Hi John, thanks for your reply.  I will look into the information you provided.  Have a great day.