What are the main differences between the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ access modes provided by Fynd platforms and how are they used?
Fynd platform provides two types of access modes for its extensions: Online and Offline Access Mode. These modes cater to different situations and requirements around user interaction and duration of access.
‘Online’ access mode is the way to go if your application needs access for a shorter duration or only works when the user is interacting with it. This means during the OAuth authorization phase, you explicitly request online access. This is useful when a user interacts with your extension via the web such as sales operations, for instance. The extension that requires to perform operations on sales channel data would preferably need ‘online’ access mode.
‘Offline’ access mode, on the other hand, is the default access invoked when none is specified. This is designed for longer access periods where user interaction isn’t necessary - essentially for background tasks triggered automatically, or for maintenance tasks. A classic example is a Bulk Coupon Generator extension that initiates the coupon generation process in the background. Such processes that continue even when the user is not actively interacting with the extension utilize an ‘offline’ access token.
Online tokens have an expiry time of 6 hours(for the online mode), and renew automatically while offline tokens have a validity of 1 hour and need to be refreshed manually using a refresh token.
You can check out the more detailed guide here.