All the inviter solutions for web apps that I have found on internet
only provide the ability to import contacts. But how does the person who
is receiving the invitation will know the sender's identity? Of course,
if the contact import solution is an integrated module of an
application A, then you can use the user info within that application A
to identify the sender. However, this requires the user to get an
account within that application A, which reduces the range of people
who can send non-anonymous invitations to use the app A. So I thought
about a modification to fix that concern
by allowing the public to send such invites.
This is done by retrieving the full name and email of the Gmail/Google
user whose contacts are imported via the OAuth2 protocol and thus
suppressing the need to create an account within app A to send a
non-incognito invites to use app A. The code is a modified version of
the
25Labs' sample source.
But first, here is an illustration to quickly show how OAuth2 works.
Knowing the format of the Google API response, I simply store the
response in a temporary XML file that I later parse to extract the name
and email of the user who is sending the invite.
To reduce the
probability of file conflict in the storage of the temporary XML file in
case of multiple simultaneous imports, I add a unique prefix that I
call "salt" and which I define as the MD5 hash of a unique string ; that
string is the concatenation of the current Unix timestamp and IP of the
user.
A slight modification for a big change. You can get the full code
here. I expect to do the same for the other email services that provide an API.
Hope this helps some developers and engineers out there.
References:
-
25Labs.com-
Developers. google.com
