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Connect to and authenticate with APIs

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Important

A new version of the Azure Digital Twins service has been released. In light of the new service's expanded capabilities, the original Azure Digital Twins service (described in this documentation set) has been retired.

To view the documentation for the new service, visit the active Azure Digital Twins Documentation.

Azure Digital Twins uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to authenticate users and protect applications. Azure AD supports authentication for a variety of modern architectures. All of them are based on the industry-standard protocols OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect. In addition, developers can use Azure AD to build single-tenant and line-of-business (LOB) applications. Developers also can use Azure AD to develop multitenant applications.

For an overview of Azure AD, visit the fundamentals page for step-by-step guides, concepts, and quickstarts.

Tip

Follow the Tutorial to set up and run an Azure Digital Twins sample app.

To integrate an application or service with Azure AD, a developer must first register the application with Azure AD. For detailed instructions and screenshots, read this quickstart.

Five primary application scenarios are supported by Azure AD:

  • Single-page application (SPA): A user needs to sign in to a single-page application that's secured by Azure AD.
  • Web browser to web application: A user needs to sign in to a web application that's secured by Azure AD.
  • Native application to web API: A native application that runs on a phone, tablet, or PC needs to authenticate a user to get resources from a web API that's secured by Azure AD.
  • Web application to web API: A web application needs to get resources from a web API secured by Azure AD.
  • Daemon or server application to web API: A daemon application or a server application with no web UI needs to get resources from a web API secured by Azure AD.

Important

Azure Digital Twins supports both of the following authentication libraries:

Call Digital Twins from a middle-tier web API

When developers architect Digital Twins solutions, they typically create a middle-tier application or API. The app or API then calls the Digital Twins API downstream. To support this standard web solution architecture, make sure that users first:

  1. Authenticate with the middle-tier application

  2. An OAuth 2.0 On-Behalf-Of token is acquired during authentication

  3. The acquired token is then used to authenticate with or call APIs that are further downstream using the On-Behalf-Of flow

For instructions about how to orchestrate the on-behalf-of flow, read OAuth 2.0 On-Behalf-Of flow. You also can view code samples in Calling a downstream web API.

Next steps

To configure and test Azure Digital Twins using the OAuth 2.0 implicit grant flow, read Configure Postman.

To learn about Azure Digital Twins security, read Create and manage role assignments.