Setting Up a Smartsheet REST Connection Manager
The REST Connection Manager is an SSIS connection manager that can be used to establish connections and facilitate data integration with REST based APIs and services such as Smartsheet, among many more.
Integration for Smartsheet is enabled by the following two components:
To add a new connection, right-click the Connection Manager area in your Visual Studio project, and choose "New Connection..." from the context menu. You will be prompted the "Add SSIS Connection Manager" window. Select the "REST (KingswaySoft)" item to add a new REST Connection Manager.
The REST Connection Manager contains 2 pages of configuration.
- General
- Advanced Settings
General Page
The General page allows you to specify connection properties and login credentials for Smartsheet REST service:
- Service Name
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The REST service that will be connected to.
- API Throttle Rate
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The API Throttle Rate will limit the number of requests that can be sent per second.
- Smartsheet Authentication
- Scope
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The Scope parameter indicates which parts of the Smartsheet user's account you'd like your app to be able to access.
- Authentication Mode
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The Authentication Mode that will be used to connect to Smartsheet. Either API Token or OAuth.
- Smartsheet Token Authentication
- API Token
-
If you have an API Token that you would like to use, enter it in the API token field.
- Smartsheet OAuth Authentication
- Sign in using the default web browser (Only available with OAuth Authorization Code authentication):
-
When this option is checked the Generate Token File button will open your default web browser in order to complete the OAuth authentication.
When this option is unchecked, the Generate Token File button will complete the entire OAuth authentication process inside of the toolkit.
- Generate Token File
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This button allows you to log in to the service endpoint and authorize your app to generate a token.
- Path To Token File
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After completing the OAuth process a token file must be saved that contains an OAuth token and an OAuth refresh token. These tokens are used to authenticate SmartSheet requests and to get new tokens if the current tokens expire.
- Token File Password
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The Token File Password that can be used by the Rest Connection Manager to access the contents of the token file.
- Test Connection
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After all the connection information has been provided, you may click the "Test Connection" button to test if the user credentials entered can connect to the selected REST service.
Advanced Settings Page
- Proxy Mode
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The Proxy Mode option allows you to specify how you want to configure the proxy server setting. There are three options available.
- No Proxy
- Auto-detect (Using system-configured proxy)
- Manual
- Proxy Server
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Using the Proxy Server option allows you to specify the name of the proxy server for the connection.
- Port
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The Port option allows you to specify the port number of the proxy server for the connection.
- Username (Proxy Server Authentication)
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The Username option (under Proxy Server Authentication) allows you to specify the proxy user account.
- Password (Proxy Server Authentication)
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The Password option (under Proxy Server Authentication) allows you to specify the proxy user's password.
Note: The Proxy Password is not included in the connection manager's ConnectionString property by default. This is by design for security reasons. However, you can include it in your ConnectionString if you want to parameterize your connection manager. The format would be ProxyPassword=myProxyPassword; (make sure you have a semicolon as the last character). It can be anywhere in the ConnectionString.
- Timeout
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The number of seconds requests should wait before timing out.
- Retry on Intermittent Errors
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The retry on intermittent errors option determines if requests will be retried when there is an error. If this option is checked requests will be retried up to 3 times.
- Ignore Certificate Errors
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This option can be used to ignore those SSL certificate errors when connecting to Smartsheet servers.
Warning: Enabling the "Ignore Certificate Errors" option is generally NOT recommended, particularly for production instances. Unless there is a strong reason to believe the connection is secure - such as the network communication is only happening in an internal infrastructure, this option should be unchecked for best security.