REST API - extending token expiration

Hello,

I have a PowerShell script making REST API calls to Content Server (24.3). One process involves a loop that downloads one document at a time, but may go on for a long time. Our CS setting for session expiry is 12 hours and this affects my PS script too, resulting in {"error":"SessionExpired"}.

What would be the best way to handle this limit in my PS script without changing the CS setting? Is there a way to check the expiration time left after each download? And then an easy way to refresh the token? or else redo the auth command? Or alternatively use try/catch to check if the session has expired and if so then redo the auth? or is there something else that can be used to satisfy this requirement?

Thanks,
Pascal

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appuq

On doing some coding, i chanced to see this there'se now an OTCSTicketExpires as well screencap is the response I received when I got a successful BWS created

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appuq

in SOAP you had methods.In REST every call you make comes back with the token, so for long-running you just have to create a pattern to change the token with what you started.

Pascal_SSC

Thanks @appuq. I don't know REST API or tokens in depth so I'm not sure what you mean by 'create a pattern to change the token with what you started'. Do you mean make a new "auth" call before each regular API command (e.g. download)?

appuq

Look at this piece of code and assume I am tasked to create 10000 BWS so my OTCSTicket is good for 30 mins(default), so I could do this for 4 hours so pseudo code or kind of bad code

let initotcsticket ="whatever you send or initially got " or for simplicity let otcsticket be a global

Did my API work? Is it a 200

Yes, then let's look at what the call returned as Headers .Use Postman to understand this

Does it have in its collection something called OTCSTicket ?

Ha, I see it lets re-initialize our variable initotcsticket= value of OTCSTicket that is in headers

Hopefully that made sense, if not try an LLM like ChatGPT :)

otcsticket // specific for an instance,e so if you have 4 otcsservers, they all might be issuing different otcstickets

otdsticket //auth token given by OTDS valid for 4 hours and in that example of 4 all of them will accept it and issue otcstickets as before.

appuq

On doing some coding, i chanced to see this there'se now an OTCSTicketExpires as well screencap is the response I received when I got a successful BWS created

Pascal_SSC

Thank you for this @appuq! I did some figuring out on how to extract that header response OTCSTicketExpires in my setup (PowerShell 5.1) and now I have it working to renew CS connection when getting close to expiry :).

Pascal_SSC

P.S. I had to use Invoke-WebRequest (instead of Invoke-RestMethod) with parameter -UseBasicParsing like this:

$response = Invoke-WebRequest -Method Get -Uri "[api call]" -Headers $header -UseBasicParsing

$expires = ([datetime]::Parse($response.Headers["OTCSTicketExpires"]))