Request for trusted application.

Hi Private User, thanks a lot for answering!

Good point! I am not sure uf and how the API guards developers from accessing profiles from others. However, I think it is not relevant to my question.
If I want to do any real automation on my behalf as a Geni user, I can write a browser app for Geni and make it work. However it has at least 2 drawbacks:
1. I need to get involved with writing a frontend to my tools
2. I need to make sure I am manually loggied in all the time.
Similarly I can create a local, local-file-based or local server-based app.
That would work with the same drawbacks.

However, it will have the same access rights as a trusted app as far as I understand.
My only ask is to have programmatic access to the profiles I am normally allowed to edit manually if I am logged in to Geni, without the requirement to run it and login to it in a browser.
AFAIKS a trusted app, a very common mechanism, is currently the only way.

As to SmartCopy. I am sure it's a nice app that can do a lot for me. Allthough I happen to be in the position that my current laptop deniies access to the heroku server it is running on for securiry reasons, the problem I was mentioning was just an example.

There is a myriad of things I'd like to do programmatically and that do not require a User Interface that I cannot currently do with Geni. For example: custom reports, custom consistency checks, finding wrong patronyms and fixing them, finding missing fields, adding birth dates as the approximate (or just before the) date of baptism, and these are just the few ones I came accross in the one month I am using the platform.

Do you have an idea why the Geni backoffice is so paranoid about these trusted applications?
In the end, the user that would use such an app would still not to provide it's credentials and the authorization keys would still have limited lifetime.
That's no different from being logged in through a browser.

I think these are even people reusing the website tokens to circumvent these kind of issues.

Finally, even though I do not intend to write much frontend code, all the code I will write will be opensource, so the Geni organisation could freelly use it for their own good to bring up new features faster.

What do you think?

I am interested to see how you login without getting a login screen and having all the permissions you need.

To make this very specific, I made this very simple node.js example which I believe is easy to follow if you have a bit of programming experience with the goal of executing a `profile/search` call on the api on behalf as myself as an authenticated user with the app I am creating, running on my local node server.

import axios from 'axios';
import { Agent } from 'https';

try {
const httpsAgent = new Agent({ rejectUnauthorized: false });

const oauth_api = axios.create({
baseURL: 'https://www.geni.com/platform/oauth/',
httpsAgent
});

const auth = await oauth_api.post('request_token', {
client_id: 'myclientid',
client_secret: 'mysecret',
username: 'myusername',
password: 'mypassword',
grant_type: 'password'
});

console.log(auth);

} catch (e) {
console.log(e)
console.log(e.message);
}

When I execute this I get "'This application is not authorized to use grant_type password"

However AFAIK the only way to get access to all the profiles I maintain on top of all public profiles and the ones with which I am cooperating. Basically the same as when I am logged into geni.com

I do get an access token and refresh token with grant_type client_credentials, however that does not give me access to my private profiles!

Private User with all due respect, but you are still missing the point.

I do not want to implement a browser app.
In addition, in your case you'll not get access to your private data, correct?

I want to implement a headless application that has access to all my private profiles.

Ah, now I get your point, you are using a browser controller in a frame for the actual user login.
That's exactly what you don't want if you want programatic access for tools and automation,
and that's where the trusted app concept is for.

I am only a system architect software these days, so it would probably take me 35 minutes to be up and running LOL ;-)

Anyhow, my conclusion still stands: for a standalone Javascrript app you need trusted app authorization, which Geni needs to enable for my app.

I am in a similar situation. I do not have access to an "embedded browser" in my app, so I need to use the "trusted app" model (why? It seems a pain).

They say to "email them", but no email address is listed that I can find. So... how, exactly?

The only alternative I then have is to make use of a server for a callback URL, which raises the level of complexity quite a bit.