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Connecting to Yammer API

Funnelback could successfully crawl Yammer API end points using Access Token. This document provides some detail on connecting to Yammer and links to available documentation.

Yammer end points:

Yammer provides JSON/XML end points for developers to extract the data. Different Yammer end points can be seen here:

https://developer.yammer.com/docs/rest-api-rate-limits

For every JSON end point (recommended), there is an XML end point as well. 

To connect to Yammer

Like other Social Networking sites (Facebook, twitter etc..), Yammer also needs OAUTH2 Authentication

These are the steps to generate an OAuth 2.0 token for testing purposes, using your browser.

• Sign up for Yammer @ https://www.yammer.com (No Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo etc.)
• Go to https://www.yammer.com/client_applications and register a new app. Guidelines to register a new App can be found here - https://developer.yammer.com/docs/app-registration
• Once the App is registered, Yammer provides a Client ID, Client Secret, redirect URL and also a link to 'Generate a Developer token for this application'.
• Clicking on the link, generates the token that can used to connect to Yammer API.
• Alternatively, there are some examples on generating Yammer token through browser here - https://developer.yammer.com/docs/test-token

To connect to client's Yammer pages, we need an access token that redirects to client website. We can request client to provide us the token to connect to Yammer or may be, we can use their website as redirect URL while registering a new App. In case of DJAG, we have requested client to provide us the access token.

Once we have the access token and required end point, Funnelback could easily crawl the end points using the Access token. The access token can be specified as a Crawler request header parameter. 

Eg: crawler.request_header=Authorization: Bearer 133015-tTJQFb6NhwfXRZGkEdSbzQ

Once the token is passed through the header, Funnelback could then successfully download the required JSON or XML. 

Points to note on Yammer

Yammer API end point returns only 20 recent posts or 20 recent messages at one single call. To extract older messages or newer messages, there are few parameters that can be used and found a document here.

http://www.archives.qld.gov.au/Recordkeeping/GRKDownloads/Documents/YammerAPI.pdf