Xero Accounting Sdk Core: authentication error

Question

I'm implementing an internal procedure to generate invoices from my database. In using .NET Core. I installed the Xero.Api.SDK.Core v. 1.1.4

I find the Xero documentation quite difficult to understand and a bit up to date. I took a look to the Github repository and they refer only to OAuth 2.0. In my case I don't want any user interaction because I want a background process.

I created an account as developer and a demo company for test.

I googled a bit and I found in a site an example how to connect to the api (I couldn't find any details in the Xero documentation).

X509Certificate2 cert = new X509Certificate2(@"public_privatekey.pfx", "password");

var api = new Xero.Api.Example.Applications.Private.PrivateAuthenticator(cert);

var private_app_api = new XeroCoreApi("https://api.xero.com", 
                                      new PrivateAuthenticator(cert),
                                      new Consumer("ClientId", "ClientSecret"), 
                                      null, null);

Now, I thought, I should use the api. I tried to read the list of contacts:

var contacts = private_app_api.Contacts;
var list = contacts.FindAsync().Result;

The result is the following error:

System.AggregateException: 'One or more errors occurred. (oauth_problem=consumer_key_unknown&oauth_problem_advice=Consumer%20key%20was%20not%20recognised)'

Inner Exception UnauthorizedException: oauth_problem=consumer_key_unknown&oauth_problem_advice=Consumer%20key%20was%20not%20recognised

Then, I downloaded the repository from Github. I copy and paste the ClientId and ClientSecret and run the tests. No one test is passed!

My goal is to create a contact or find one in the list, create an invoice and save the invoice in PDF format in my storage.

How can I do that? Is there any example for that?

PS: In the developer forum the login doesn't work and the Postman collection is old and it doesn't either.

Update

I was desperate. I tried to connect to the apis in another way with XOauth. Worst. I created the connection as Xero explains on Github.

When I try to connect with

xoauth connect

a new tab in my browser is opened and...

Postman Update

I followed the steps with Postman. I opened the collection in my Postman. In the environment I updated client_id and client_secret from the Xero Developer site and then the following configurations:

re_directURI: https://developer.xero.com

scopes: offline_access profile email accounting.transactions

Auth URL: https://login.xero.com/identity/connect/authorize

Access Token: https://identity.xero.com/connect/token

I opened Get started api, Generate token and I gave the same result.

Look on the youtube channel. There's a video showing how to do a machine-to-machine connection which you'll need for a background process. I'm doing a Windows service, which is also background. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7DA_vntKKChsenzpL7QWPg/videos — droopsnoot, May 10 '20 at 17:23
Your code is using the old-style OAuth 1 calls, and while you can still create apps that way using a special link, you'll only be able to do that until June. So there's not a lot of point in creating new stuff using that now. — droopsnoot, May 10 '20 at 17:24
This is in the documentation and in the Github repository. I found everything very confused and messy. I tried to look the Youtube channel, it is worse: most of the video are old. There is only one video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcf_64yreVI quite chaotic and I can't understand how to do that. — Enrico, May 10 '20 at 17:44
Oh, that's the one I was thinking of, that cleared up a few things for me. I don't use the API now, I use XOAuth to get the token in the first place, then a HTTP POST to refresh it when needed, and HTTP get or post as required to interact with Xero. My problem with the sample code is I'm using VB, not c#, so I either had to try to translate from an unfamiliar language, or learn one. — droopsnoot, May 10 '20 at 18:38
With `XOAuth` you created the first token and with this one you call the other api. Is it working? If the token expired, what are you doing? — Enrico, May 10 '20 at 20:03
I create an access token and a refresh token with XOauth. The refresh token has an expiry, and my code checks that before accessing Xero. If it's expired, I call the refresh endpoint (as described in that video) and get a new pair of tokens, and a new expiry. I don't use the API now - I couldn't see how to refresh from the API, so once I'd got HTTP get and post working, there didn't seem any point adding complexity. — droopsnoot, May 11 '20 at 08:47

Enrico · Answer 1 · 2020-05-22T12:05:15.777

Honestly, it was quite a mess. I spent more than 2 weeks to understand how to call Xero. I created a post to explain step by step what I have to do.

There were a lot of issues:

understand the Xero documentation because it is not very clear
find the right values to put in the request
translate the Postman request in code
no Xero documentation for that, only a useless bunch of projects

It is quite long to explain everything but for example if you want to read an Organization the code with RestSharp is:

/// <summary>
/// Gets the organizations.
/// </summary>
/// <returns>OrganizationResponse.</returns>
public OrganizationResponse GetOrganizations()
{
    var _client = new RestClient("https://api.xero.com/connections");
    _client.Timeout = -1;

    var request = new RestRequest(Method.GET);
    request.AddHeader("Authorization", "Bearer " + _settings.AccessToken);
    var response = _client.Execute<IList<Organization>>(request);

    return response;
}

I'll create other posts to explain how to implement more functions.

I created a NuGet package for that. Source code on Github.

Xero Accounting Sdk Core: authentication error

Update

Postman Update

1 Answers1