Integrating Azure AD Access Control to social authentication for iOS app

Question

I am writing an iOS app and using Azure Mobile Services for my identity management and DocumentDB for noSQL DB. However the only access control that I can see for DocumentDB is when we use Active Directory (which I am not currently using.)

I see from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/fundamentals-identity/ that there is a way of integrating access control service without using the active directory authentication. However I can't find any documentation showing how this can be done. Has anyone done this? I am on a mac and developing for iOS. The only documentation I see is for .NET and a ASP.NET MVC application: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-dotnet-how-to-use-access-control/

Also, does anyone know if Active Directory can be integrated with a JavaScript backend? All the docs show using Active Directory with a .NET backend.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Can you point to the docs you're referring to on securing DocDB with AAD?

You should be able to leverage resource tokens for Doc Db just fine, regardless of if you have an AAD identity. You can read more about resource tokens here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/documentdb-secure-access-to-data/ .

To answer your question on AAD in the Node.JS backend, this is supported, but only through the server-orchestrated flow, as documented here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/mobile-services-ios-get-started-users/ . If you were looking to use the ADAL library and get tokens on the client, this is only supported for the .NET runtime.

Also, for reference, Access Control Service is a specific service which is not currently receiving updates in favor of AAD which will take on that functionality. More about that here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2013/06/22/azure-active-directory-is-the-future-of-acs.aspx