Xamarin Forms, ADAL No Refresh Token

0
votes

I have followed the great example on integrating ADAL and Xamarin Forms by Vittorio. I am still struggling though on how to best implement authentication in mobile applications based on Xamarin Forms.

  1. What is the best way to authenticate a user in a mobile application base on Xamarin (forma) knowing that the user is registered in an Active Directory on premise which is synced to an Azure Active Directory? Currently I am using ADAL for that but would it perhaps be better to use Azure Mobile Services? I need a token so that I can authenticate a user in a webapi running in Azure Websites.

  2. When I follow the example of Vittorio, I run into a problem that I don't get a refresh token from the AAD authentication call. I should not that my AAD redirects the real authentication call to an on premise ADFS server. I am not sure if that could be the problem?

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authenticationxamarinadfsadal

1 Answers

1
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for #1 you can use the ADAL sample exactly as is - the only difference is that you need to configure your app to request access to your web API and pass the API resource is when you acquire a token. See setup instructions in https://github.com/AzureADSamples/NativeClient-DotNet.

For the refresh token: ADAL used it automatically from its cache, but people often did not know/understand that and used the returned refresh token manually, doing a lot of extra work... So we are no longer returning the token in the result, but we do use it automatically whenever you call acquiretoken and the token needs renewing.