Month: January 2023

Getting a bearer token from AAD using Logic Apps

Why?

You can use the built in authentication when calling, for example, external APIs. It is one of the best features of Logic Apps. Sometimes you might need to get the auth token anyway. Such as when you think Logic Apps does not support OAUTH 2.0 (Thank you Mötz Jensen for helping me understand it.)

How?

You need to get the usual things: Client ID, Client Secret and audience, or scope depending on the version of OAUTH you need to use. For version 2.0 you need to use scope. Please replace scope with audience in the examples below.

In my example I will use the following settings (pseudo-real):

Property Value
Client ID 0352cf0f-2e7a-4aee-801d-7f27f8344c77
Client Secret Th15154S3cr32t!
Scope https://api.myhome.com/.default
Tenant ID a2c10435-de68-4994-99b2-13fed13bdadf

Configuring a call

Create a Logic app HTTP step and set the following properties:

Property Setting
Method POST
URI https://login.microsoftonline.com/tenantID/oauth2/v2.0/token
Headers
Key Value
Content-type application/x-www-form-urlencoded

The body is a bit more tricky. You need to create a URL-string with login info. It is not that hard. Just type the property name, set a = sign and the add the property value. Inbetween properties you put a & sign (like a URL).

Using my values from above, the resulting string will look like this:

Client_Id=0352cf0f-2e7a-4aee-801d-7f27f8344c77&Client_Secret=Th15154S3cr32t!&grant_type=client_credentials&scope=https://api.myhome.com/.default

Remember to add the grant_type=client_credentials and you must not use any line breaks. It is just a long string.

Result

Looking at this in logic apps, the step looks like this:

Using the token

To use the token in a call you need to do two things.

  1. Get the token value from the output of the Get Token step.
  2. Add the token as a header to the call you need to make.

Get the token value

To make things easy I used a Parse JSON step and provided this schema:

{
    "properties": {
        "access_token": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "expires_in": {
            "type": "integer"
        },
        "ext_expires_in": {
            "type": "integer"
        },
        "token_type": {
            "type": "string"
        }
    },
    "type": "object"
}

Use the token value

In this case I am calling an API that expects an OAUTH 2.0 token. I configured the step like this:

The short-short version

Issue a call to your AAD using an application/x-www-form-urlencoded body. Making sure the body is one long URL-encoded string.