Hello,
I'm veteran web developer who's new to Clover, and have a question about how to access our merchant data via the REST API.
The use case is querying Clover data from our website's administrative backend in order to generate on-demand reports of recent sales and current inventory levels.
There's seems to be a way to generate an API token directly from my Merchant Dashboard screen, but it seems that can no longer be used to access production data.
Instead, the docs (https://docs.clover.com/docs/using-oauth-20) direct me to set up a developer account and develop a Clover 'app', which I then install on my Merchant account. We then use standard OAuth techniques to obtain an authorization code and trade it for an access token that we can use to make an API request.
This basically makes sense, but I'm confused about taking this into production - It seems like I need to publish this 'app' in the Clover App marketplace, then connect it to my production account. Naturally I'm reluctant to do this, as we would never ever want any other Merchant to access this app.
Is this the only way for me to access my production data? All of the API documentation seems to be for the use case of Developers publishing Apps into the Marketplace, and while I'm willing to do this, it just seems like the wrong path.
Thanks for any feedback!
I've read previous posts on this forum from a few years back and it seems like I'm not the only one who's confused.