Step 2: Backend Integration

Mercoa has a fully documented REST API that can be used in any language. We also have Node, Python, Java, .NET, and Go SDKs for easy backend integration.

At Mercoa, we aim to provide a seamless and whitelabeled experience for your users. As part of this experience, Mercoa does not force users to create a new account or log in to a different system.

Instead, Mercoa uses JWT tokens that you can 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 make this easy.

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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 1 hour, but you can change this by passing in the expiresIn option when generating the token.