Managing shared accounts with Packs used in templates

Making Packs
1

I run a video company. We have a project tracking template shared internally.

The template makes use of my frame.io Pack to pull in videos, review links, comments, etc. We always want to use the same Frame-io credentials (our general primary company account).

THE PROBLEM

Sometimes, the frame-io account requires reauthorization. I haven’t been able to determine the pattern; perhaps I need to just dig in on this problem, but I also feel like this just happens with OAuth sometimes (token expiry or something?) and is a part of life.

Re-authenticating is not hard, whatever. BUT.

It can only be completed by the person who created the doc (from the template) in the first place.

E.g…

  • Ahmed creates a doc.
  • There is no way for him to inherit the Pack account from the template (right? it would be nice if he could…)
  • So on doc creation he needs to authenticate with Frame-io using a Packs account tied to his Coda account (even if he’s using same frame-io creds as everyone else)
  • Later, Beatrice tries to sync videos, but the creds have failed
  • The only way she can fix it is to add her own instance of the frame-io creds in a Packs account tied to her Coda account
  • She can’t just do this in one place though; she has to do it on every table (and some tables only exist on hidden database pages, in my case)

This makes Ahmed, Beatrice, and the whole team very, very sad.

Anybody know how to make them happier?

IDEAS

One thing I was thinking was instead of having users create docs from the template in a normal Coda way, I could instead generate project management docs for them via API with a consistent doc owner. Not sure if I can automate the allocation of a Packs account from that doc owner, but if I can, that would at least mean that all docs in the workspace would rely on a single frame-io Packs account. If ever there was an auth issue, fixing that issue in one place would fix it for all the docs.

Another approach is just to create a private version of the Pack with system auth (can I do this with OAuth? not sure I’ve tried). This is currently my most promising solution, but sucks because

  • Maintaining dual codebases is annoying and I’d like to keep supporting and growing the public version
  • It doesn’t solve what I suspect may be a similar problem for other users
2

Ugh seems like I can’t use OAuth2 for SystemAuthentication (not seeing it in the type definition for SystemAuthenticationDef).

@Eric_Koleda do you know why not?

3

Hi @Nick_HE - While most APIs return refresh tokens that are valid forever, some APIs include Frame.io have refresh tokens that expire:

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While Pack accounts can be used by anyone in the doc, there isn’t a way to share Pack accounts with someone such that they can use or reconnect them in any doc. I think a possible solution may be to have a centralized “robot” account make the doc copies, and if it’s account is used in the template than it will copy through to the copy. It could potentially even re-assign the owner after the copy is complete, so that other owner functions (publishing, etc) aren’t tied to the robot account anymore.

Unfortunately system OAuth was never an option we supported. I don’t know if there is a good reason we don’t support it, other than it just requires adding more UI specific to managing it in the Pack settings dialog. I’ll file a feature request for it though, since I think there are occasionally times when it would be useful.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the mostly-bad, but clear and detailed news @Eric_Koleda !

Maybe I could stand up a proxy server to handle this, though I’ve never implemented OAuth myself and it sounds like a chore (there must be some libraries at least…).