@azure/communication-common

Azure Communication Common client library for JavaScript

This package contains common code for Azure Communication Service libraries.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription.
• An existing Communication Services resource. If you need to create the resource, you can use the Azure Portal, the Azure PowerShell, or the Azure CLI.

Installing

npm install @azure/communication-common

Browser support

JavaScript Bundle

To use this client library in the browser, first you need to use a bundler. For details on how to do this, please refer to our bundling documentation.

Key concepts

CommunicationTokenCredential and AzureCommunicationTokenCredential

The CommunicationTokenCredential is an interface used to authenticate a user with Communication Services, such as Chat or Calling.

The AzureCommunicationTokenCredential offers a convenient way to create a credential implementing the said interface and allows you to take advantage of the built-in auto-refresh logic.

Depending on your scenario, you may want to initialize the AzureCommunicationTokenCredential with:

• a static token (suitable for short-lived clients used to e.g. send one-off Chat messages) or
• a callback function that ensures a continuous authentication state during communications (ideal e.g. for long Calling sessions).

The tokens supplied to the AzureCommunicationTokenCredential either through the constructor or via the token refresher callback can be obtained using the Azure Communication Identity library.

Examples

Create a credential with a static token

For a short-lived clients, refreshing the token upon expiry is not necessary and the AzureCommunicationTokenCredential may be instantiated with a static token.

const tokenCredential = new AzureCommunicationTokenCredential(
  "eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJleHAiOjM2MDB9.adM-ddBZZlQ1WlN3pdPBOF5G4Wh9iZpxNP_fSvpF4cWs"
);

Create a credential with a callback

Here we assume that we have a function fetchTokenFromMyServerForUser that makes a network request to retrieve a JWT token string for a user. We pass it into the credential to fetch a token for Bob from our own server. Our server would use the Azure Communication Identity library to issue tokens. It's necessary that the fetchTokenFromMyServerForUser function returns a valid token (with an expiration date set in the future) at all times.

const tokenCredential = new AzureCommunicationTokenCredential({
  tokenRefresher: async () => fetchTokenFromMyServerForUser("[e-mail]"),
});

Create a credential with proactive refreshing

Setting refreshProactively to true will call your tokenRefresher function when the token is close to expiry.

const tokenCredential = new AzureCommunicationTokenCredential({
  tokenRefresher: async () => fetchTokenFromMyServerForUser("[e-mail]"),
  refreshProactively: true,
});

Create a credential with proactive refreshing and an initial token

Passing initialToken is an optional optimization to skip the first call to tokenRefresher. You can use this to separate the boot from your application from subsequent token refresh cycles.

const tokenCredential = new AzureCommunicationTokenCredential({
  tokenRefresher: async () => fetchTokenFromMyServerForUser("[e-mail]"),
  refreshProactively: true,
  token:
    "eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJleHAiOjM2MDB9.adM-ddBZZlQ1WlN3pdPBOF5G4Wh9iZpxNP_fSvpF4cWs",
});

Troubleshooting

• Invalid token specified: Make sure the token you are passing to the AzureCommunicationTokenCredential constructor or to the tokenRefresher callback is a bare JWT token string. E.g. if you're using the Azure Communication Identity library or REST API to obtain the token, make sure you're passing just the token part of the response object.

Next steps

• Read more about Communication user access tokens

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to this library, please read the contributing guide to learn more about how to build and test the code.

Related projects

• Microsoft Azure SDK for Javascript