making a POST call to the /contacts/sign_up_form endpoint. WITHOUT OAUTH

[MelissaW7]

When submitting an internal form, our users are asked if they also want to subscribe to our CC newsletter.

Is there a way to do submit their email, (create a contact), without going through the rigamroll of the OAUTH process?  The simple CC inline form performs this function, but there is no visible way to just make the same post without the embedded form.

[Courtney_E]

Hello MelissaW7,

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.

At this time, all 3rd-party built applications that integrate with Constant Contact must use the OAuth2 authorization protocol to securely authenticate a Constant Contact user account, and to be granted access to that user's data.

However, with the recent update to our new authorization management service, we did recently release the capability to generate V3 keys that offer a Long Lived Refresh Token (which can be configured within your key’s settings), where you can use the same refresh token continuously to generate new Access Tokens.

While we generally recommend using rotating refresh tokens (as they're more secure), using a long lived refresh token should alleviate many of the situations that we've seen reported where a refresh token becomes invalid, and then requires a new authorization request.

Additionally, we also now offer the Device Flow, which does not require using redirect URLs, callbacks, or the client secret. Instead, it requires getting a device_code, and then the application’s client_id and the device_code are used to get an access token.

OAuth2 Device Flow

https://v3.developer.constantcontact.com/api_guide/device_flow.html

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

[MelissaW7]

Courtney,

Thank you but this does not help.  Let me better explain.

We only want to access our own data.

Users requesting information on our site can also request being added to a CC newsletter by selecting a checkbox.

We want to automate adding this contact with the API instead of logging into CC to enter in manually.

As far as I can figure out all of the Authorization flows require someone to log in and authorize our code to add the contact.  

Refresh tokens seem to reduce that effort but not eliminate it and require a greater amount of coding for a simple process.

The embedded form allows a user to add themselves as a contact, there should be a similar method that I can use programmatically with out having to log in and Authorize.