Paypal api oauth

I'm making a PayPal API call in the context of an e-Commerce solution I'm developing in Angular-JS. I was able to get an auth_token back from PayPal using the following code. The two gotchas that caught me up for some time were:

1. The ClientId and ClientSecret have to be joined by a colon and base64 encoded (as FinnK says above)

2. When sending the data as an object data: {'grant_type': 'client_credentials'} I was receiving an error that 'grant_type' is a required parameter. After changing this to a string joined with an equals sign I no longer received this error.

   var basicAuthString = btoa('CLIENTID:SECRET');$http({  method: 'POST',  url: 'https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/oauth2/token',  headers: {    'Accept': 'application/json',    'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',    'Authorization': 'Basic ' + basicAuthString,  },  data: 'grant_type=client_credentials'}).success(function(data){  console.log(data.access_token);}).error(function(error){  console.error(error);});

I hope this was helpful for someone stuck trying to implement this.

Client id and secret need be sent in an Authorization header.

Client id and secret need be concatenated with a : separator (e.g. client:secret), and then encoded in base 64. This is called basic authentication, and what cURL does behind the scene when using the -u option.

You can pass custom headers to $http.post in a third parameter. See the method documentation. Example, using $http directly (and heavily inspired from the documentation):

var req = {  method: 'POST',  url: 'http://example.com',  headers: {   'Authorization': "Basic 12Base346456enc0did"  },  data: { grant_type: 'client_credentials' }}$http(req).success(function(){...}).error(function(){...});