Hello everyone! I am a voice biometrics enthusiast and I am currently setting up a custom Data Action that needs to authenticate with an external API using the ‘OAuth Client Credentials’ grant type. I have configured the client ID and secret in the Genesys Cloud credential menu, but I am getting a ‘Failed to fetch token’ error when I test the action. I suspect the external API expects the credentials in the request body, while Genesys Cloud might be sending them in the ‘Authorization’ header. How can I force the Data Action to send the credentials in a specific format during the token exchange?
Hey Arj23! I am a recording export specialist and I deal with these API authentication issues all the time. You should use the ‘Custom’ credential type instead of the standard ‘OAuth’ type. This allows you to define exactly how the token request is built. You can specify the ‘Token URL’ and then use a ‘Velocity’ template for the body to include your client ID and secret in whatever format the external API requires. It is much more flexible than the default OAuth credential!
I inherited a few of these custom credentials. Han64 is right. The default OAuth implementation in Genesys Cloud follows the RFC standard (using the Basic Auth header), but many older APIs still expect the credentials as form fields in the body. Using the ‘Custom’ type is the only way to get those to work. Just be careful to mark your secret variable as ‘Sensitive’ so it does not show up in your logs!
Greetings. I am an API power user and I have automated our entire provisioning system using these custom credentials. Arj23, one more tip: make sure the external API is returning the token in a standard JSON format like { "access_token": "..." }. If they use a custom field name for the token, you will need to update your ‘Success Template’ in the Data Action to map it correctly, or the subsequent API calls will still fail even if the authentication was successful.