Comment 78 for bug 1844453

Revision history for this message
In , Cloph-0 (cloph-0) wrote :

(In reply to Colin from comment #70)
> This from Google drive support in response to me asking them how to gain
> access;
>
> When you contact Libre Office Support, please let them know that you need
> help with the 6 digit PIN so that it will allow remote access from your
> Libre Office account.
>
> Where does the 6 digit pin originate?

That pin was part of the now no longer supported login mechanism into your gdrive account, it wasn't used by LibreOffice as a pin or password to protect the documents, but rather just how the login worked..

> I imagine even if LO fixes the issue then "newer" LO users who haven't
> previously availed themselves of the service simply won't have a 6 Digit PIN.

And they won't need that pin.

> That's certainly my situation. I'm not trying to access existing files, just
> trying to implement the cloud storage for some CALCs by File> Open Remote>
> Add Service (from the dropdown menu defaulting to Manage services.

Both cases will be solved when the login/token generation is changed as described in comment#67, similar as it has been done for onedrive for 7.1.0 (fixing gdrive login is on the todo, but just didn't make it into 7.1.0).

So then the user-experience would be (for the time being):
* User chossed to open/save to remote service
* LO asks to copy the login URL to browser
* User logs in to the service using their browser, granting LibreOffice the access privileges if not already done so in the past
* browser will return a code that has to be pasted back into the LibreOffice window
→ for the duration of the LO session, LO can then create access tokens and won't have to ask the user again.

To be fully clear: I know that this is not a great user-experience, so the copy-the-code-back to the LibreOffice window can be solved by having LibreOffice listen on a localhost address and setting the redirect URL to that localhost address, so that would eliminate the need for manually copy'n'paste.
But the bigger drawback is that currently LibreOffice doesn't store the refresh_token, so it will have to ask every time LO is started and the files are accessed. (typically they are valid for multiple weeks/months)
They should be securely stored locally, so the most natural way would be to use LibreOffice's password-store for that, so the user only would have to unlock it using the master password and not do the login-dance.