Step 2: Backend Integration

Mercoa has a fully documented Rest API that can be used in any language. We also have Node, Python, and Java SDKs.

One of our goals at Mercoa is to provide a seamless and whitelabeled experience for your users. As part of the experience, Mercoa does not force users to create a new account or login to a different system.

Instead, Mercoa uses JWT tokens that you generate to transparently authenticate the user session on the frontend.

Steps to generate a token:

1. User logs into your platform
2. Find the Mercoa Entity that corresponds to that user’s business.
3. Optional: Sync individual users and their roles. This is required for Approvals.
4. Generate a JWT and pass it to the frontend.
5. Use the JWT with our frontend SDK, React Components, or embedded iFrame.

Creating a Token

Let’s create an endpoint that authenticates the user, generates a JWT with the entityId, and return the generated token. We will use Mercoa’s Generate JWT Token endpoint to do the heavy lifting for us.

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from django.http import HttpResponse
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from mercoa.client import Mercoa
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client = Mercoa(token="YOUR_API_KEY")
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def generate_mercoa_token(request):
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client.entity.get_token(entity_id="ENTITY_ID_FROM_STEP_ONE",{})
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return HttpResponse(token)

Using the Token

Now that we have a token, we can use it to authenticate the user in our frontend application. Tokens have a default expiration of 24 hours, but you can change this by passing in the expiresIn option when generating the token.