API Authentication

[Ross Boucher]

I'm using the API to upload new presentations to slideshare, but I'm
running into a slight challenge.

In order to export to slideshare, we have to do about 30 seconds with
of conversion on our end. Once that's done we send the document to
slideshare. Unfortunately, if the password was wrong, we need to then
pass that on to the user so they can correct it. This essentially
means forcing the user to wait for 30 seconds or more while we do the
conversion just to verify the password.

What we'd like to do is check the password immediately, and then just
send the user an e-mail when the document is finished exporting to
slideshare and ready to be viewed online. To do this though, we would
need another API method -- something like CheckAuthorization, or even
just another list slideshows method that accepted authentication to
list private slideshows (and would return an error if the
authentication was wrong). I think this might be useful to other
people as well (especially the private slideshows list).

Does this seem like something Slideshare would be willing to do?

Thanks,

Ross Boucher
rbou...@gmail.com

[jboutelle]

Interesting requirement! This seems reasonable.

It would smell something like this: feedback requested now before we
code it!

(http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/authenticate) with the following
required parameters:
api_key
username
password

If authentication was successful, it would return something like this:
<SlideShareAuthOK></SlideShareAuthOK>

In the case of API or user authentication problems, it would return
the following.
<SlideShareServiceError>
<Message id={various numbers go here}>{various messages go here}</
Message>
</SlideShareServiceError>

The message / ID in a SlideShareService error will be one of the
following:
1 Failed API validation
2 Failed User authentication
10 User Not Found

Regards,
-Jon Boutelle

> rbouc...@gmail.com

[Ross Boucher]

This looks good to me. Would make my life a lot easier.

Thanks,
Ross