I'm looking to do an integration that makes use of a shared calendar for the domain my app is installed on. My initial plan was to create the calendar under the domain admin that is shared with the rest of the users on the domain. My concern though is what happens if the domain admin changes?
It seems like that calendar could potentially be lost. What are the best practices in this circumstance? Should I be making an admin account for myself at the time of install? Or should I be creating calendars under my service account?
When admin is changed for a domain, before changing, another admin should be assigned. It cannot happen domain with no admin. So, the new admin gets all the rights to the calendar.
If you want to maintain a single calendar and share with all the users in the domain better go with Admin account.
If you want to have individual calendars to all the users and want to access their calendars, go with service account. With service account you have to do domain wide delegation means sharing your service account to the calendar. Also, users initially should give access to the service account to access the information.
Check this link and this link for calendar sharing options.
Related
Should I use a Service Account or an OAuth 2.0 Client ID?
I'm struggling to understand Google's documentation on authenticating for their APIs. I'm creating a basic application that will help users add and modify Google Calendar events for a single Google account (the account is shared between all users). I only need the application to access that one account, it'll never need to access any others.
It seems to me that Service Account would be best for this, but Google's documentation suggests Service Accounts should only be used for automated processes (unless I'm misunderstanding). For instance this page contains the following, describing when to use Service Accounts.
Would my application qualify as acting on the users behalf?
If so, I would want to use OAuth Client ID credentials, which will ask the user to sign in to a google account. In this case, is there a way I can guarantee they only sign in to the one account I want modified?
I can't find any decent documentation on the OAuth authentication requests to figure this out myself. If there is any could you point me there?
I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something basic here, but thank you for any help!
First off you should know that you can only use service accounts with Google aclendar api if you have a google workspace domain account.
You can then set up a calendar and a domain user that the service account can act on behalf of to control the access of that calendar.
Assuming that your application is going to preform all actions on this calendar then yes i would say that you could use a service account for this. If your app bacly has a ui with a calendar on it your just using google calendar to store the data.
However if you intend to share this calendar with the users themselves, this way they could see it within their own google Calendar account. Im not sure a service account would be the way to go.
If you want the users to be able to see it and make changes then you may want to just use Oauth2. Grant them access to the calendar and then request access to their calendar account.
Drawback to that option is going to be the verification process. You will get access to all the users calendars and your going to need write access.
If you can go with a service account you really should consider it it will save you a lot of hassle with verification.
I want to access the entire events existing in a calendar of a gsuite domain. I tried using domain deligation with service account and it allows me to assume a user and get all of its events but i want to fetch the entire events in a gsuite account.
In order to achieve your task, you should create a service account which impersonates the admin of the domain.
Afterwards, you can retrieve the users of the domain by making use of the Admin SDK.
GET https://admin.googleapis.com/admin/directory/v1/users
Based on the list you get, you can get the events from the calendar of each user.
GET https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/calendarId/events
Where, calendarId is the email of one of the users from the domain.
Reference
Admin SDK users.list;
Calendar API events.list.
We are trying to create a separate Admin role to assign to users to be able to call the Google Classroom API (domain). If we set them to be 'super admin' it works but we do not want to give these users super admin permissions. Anyone knows any guide or the settings to set on this?
Answer:
There is no role apart from Super Admin that will let a user make all these actions. You can check that by assigning custom admin roles to the user. Even if all possible privileges are checked, if the user is not a Super Admin, the user cannot act as a domain administrator in Classroom API.
What non-Super Admins can do:
Non-super admin users can only access courses they are part of (as teachers, or students), not all courses in the domain.
They can remove students and other teachers from courses they own directly via courses.teachers.delete and courses.students.delete, but they cannot directly add new students and teachers to their courses via courses.teachers.create and courses.students.create. Only domain administrators (Super Admins) can do that. Non-admins must first send an invitation via invitations.create(), and obtain the user's consent.
Update: Service Accounts:
You can also make your application use a Service Account in order to impersonate a Super Admin, so that this account can act on behalf of this admin, and do what the admin can do. To do this, you would have to create the Service Account and delegate domain-wide authority to it, by visiting the Admin console and following the steps specified here.
Beware, granting domain-wide delegation is a very powerful tool, since it gives the Service Account the ability to act on behalf of any user in the domain, so it could be easily abused if not managed carefully (without domain-wide delegation, a Service Account is similar to a regular account, and it can only access resources that have been created by it, shared with it, etc., like a regular account).
Anyway, once the domain-wide delegation is created, using the Service Account in your application is very similar to using a regular account. In the application, you have to build the credentials and then specify which user should be impersonated by the account by writing the user's email address. I don't know which language are you using, but you can find code snippets to do this in Java and Python here, or with Node here.
Reference:
Create custom administrator roles
Manage Teachers and Students
I have an app using s2s connection with google calendar api. I need to create an event in different users calendars. To make it possible the user should go to the calendar's settings and share their calendar to the service account.
But I would like to simplify this for the user - so that they don't need to go to their calendar settings. I don't have an interface for the user interaction - it's a bot.
How can I access the user's calendar in another way?
Maybe you can change the role set by the user to the calendar. According to this documentation, the owners of a calendar can share the calendar by giving access to other users. The sharing settings of a given calendar are represented by the ACL collection (access control list) of that calendar. Each resource in the ACL collection grants a specified grantee a certain access role. So the user can make you the writer or owner of their calendar, so that you can access it.
Another way is by using Delegating domain-wide authority to the service account,
If you have a Google Apps domain—if you use Google Apps for Work, for
example—an administrator of the Google Apps domain can authorize an
application to access user data on behalf of users in the Google Apps
domain. For example, an application that uses the Google Calendar API
to add events to the calendars of all users in a Google Apps domain
would use a service account to access the Google Calendar API on
behalf of users. Authorizing a service account to access data on
behalf of users in a domain is sometimes referred to as "delegating
domain-wide authority" to a service account
I am making a very simple marketplace app using the new SDK (Oauth 2.0). One of the steps would be to automatically invite team members for a closed group so I would need access to team members (users in same domain) from the user that is starting the process going through the default "navigator icon in google navigation menu".
This is working fine, however it is only working for administrators (tried with both Directory API and Profiles data API).Is there a way to simply "read" the email from users without needing to have administrator rights? It seems quite an overkill to ask a user to be administrator just for the purpose of being able to invite his team members.
These email addresses are in the user contact list for example, when writing an email they are automatically there so it shoulnt be much of permission problem I guess. can anyone help a bit on how I can accomplish this? Maybe a different API that I have not found?
Very much appreciated,
Best regards,
Joao Garin
You can use "Service Accounts" to access the Directory API on behalf of the Administrator when any user accesses the App.
The Drive API has a really good set of samples here - https://developers.google.com/drive/delegation
This same technique will work with Admin SDK. The end result is the auth is not made on behalf of the user at the keyboard but as an authorized Service Account. This Service Account is authorized by the admin at the time of install.