Getting Started with Microsoft Graph and Application Registration

Key Takeaways

hello everyone thanks for joining us ansara joined by Alisha and we're gonna be talking about Microsoft identity platform so Alexa tell me more about what is microfiber in the platform yeah the Microsoft identity platform allows developers to build applications that can sign in all Microsoft identities so organizational accounts also referred to as a trading accounts as well as personal Microsoft accounts and it also lets them get tokens to call Microsoft api's like Microsoft graph thanks so much for the introduction Alicia so how can we go about creating or integrating with the platform yeah so let's start in the Azure portal so if you navigate to portal AFRICOM and then we can go ahead and navigate to Azure Active Directory and under that we'll go to app registrations okay so that will bring us to the app registrations experience here and once we're there we can go ahead and click new registration and so that will bring up this registration page oh cool so here we can provide a name for our app so I'll just call this my test app next we can choose which kind of accounts we want to support so as I mentioned we can support organizational accounts we can choose if we want them to be part of this directory only this is the contoso directory or we can choose accounts in any organizational directory directory and lastly we can choose organizational accounts as well as personal Microsoft accounts okay so this is by far the biggest number of accounts that we can target and so we'll go ahead and choose that one and then lastly we can optionally provide a redirect URI the redirect URI is where the authentication response will be sent after the user authenticates so we'll say we're building a web app that's hosted locally and so over here we'll just enter localhost as our redirect URI okay so once we've filled in all that information we'll go ahead and click register and our app will be created wait that's it that's all it takes to create an app that's it so now the app is registered an application ID also referred to as a client ID is assigned to the application and this is the the piece that will be used code to refer to this registration we also see some additional details about the application like the supported account types that we selected the fact that a redirect URI was registered as well and then we can see some links to documentation and some steps to get started okay so this is about creating the app but what if I wanted to get some of my data using Microsoft graph how do I go about doing that yeah so to set up your app to request permissions you'll go ahead and navigate to this API permissions section here and then you'll select to add a permission that will bring up a variety of api's for you to choose from and we'll go ahead and select Microsoft graph and then we'll have a choice between delegated permissions or application permissions so delegated permissions are used when there is a signed in user present and application permissions are used when the application is running as a background service or a daemon okay so we'll go ahead and choose delegated permissions we'll have a user present in our app so then what kind of permissions would you like to request what's big calendar I'm I I want to build an app that uses somebody's calendar information or logging to users cabinet information okay let's go ahead and select to read users calendars so we check that and click to add permissions and then that is added to our list of requested permissions and we get a notification telling us that permissions have changed okay now because I'm signed in with an admin account I can also go ahead and grant admin consent for these permissions okay so I just will confirm that I want to do that mhm and once that's done the status is reflected here in the admin consent required status and so what this means is that when my users go to use my application they won't need to consent to these permissions okay awesome so what if my app has an or you know we have an architecture where we require a client certificate or a secret - - you know for the app so how do I go about accessing and configuring that piece yeah so you would go ahead and navigate to the certificates and secret section and let's say we want to use a client secret also referred to as an application password we will go ahead and click new client secret and provide a brief description and then we can choose when it will expire one year or two years or never okay so I'll just go ahead and say that it'll expire in one year and once once I click Add there I get the value of it so it's really important to copy this value because this is the value that I need for my secret and I won't be able to retrieve it after I'm only to generate a new secret if I if I lose this and it's important to also store it securely so thanks for showing that Leisha I see there are a lot of other options here and this and these played so can you tell me more about what what they get us any yeah so for the overview that it's that's already what we saw when we registered our application so we have the information about the app there for QuickStart if if your application matches the platforms that we have supported here it's an easy way for you to get your application started okay so you can go ahead and use one of those under branding you can choose you can change the name of your application or you can upload a logo you can provide links to your Terms of Service and Privacy statement typically these things appear on the consent prompt to when users are using your application okay under authentication we can see the redirect URI that we registered earlier as well some of as well as some other options under owners we can add owners to be able to register it be able to manage this registration as well so if we have a co-worker that's working with us on this project we can add them here okay and lastly we have the manifest and so this is a JSON representation of your app object you can use this to modify properties that we don't have UI for or if you find this method easier you can just go ahead and modify the JSON directly and that works as well okay awesome so I do have a question about the API permissions when we picked like we were scrolling down that big giant list that we had that we would pick permissions what if some developer is new to the platform and they want to know more about the permissions where do they go and find about what permissions they need and how they access it yeah so for permissions we have some links to documentation for the specific API s and so if we look at the Microsoft graph API we have a link to documentation here so if we just go ahead and click this link it'll take us to a permissions reference okay awesome and this lists all the permissions here okay awesome that's great thank you so much for showing us lecture I did not know app creation was so simple and I can't wait to try it out myself and thank you everyone for joining us and I hope you guys enjoy the app creation experience as much as I did