How to authenticate orchestrator api using windows credentials

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I was looking into a semi-related issue (using the HTTP request activity) and authenticating against another REST service that does not accept Basic auth and the current user doesn’t have authorization.

When inspecting the traffic, I can see four requests with a single activity.

  1. Connect
  2. GET passing Authorization header with Basic, which is rejected in my case
  3. Connect
  4. GET passing Authorization head with Negotiate

In my use case, my domain user has authorization to the service in question, but for the unattended robot, the service account being used does not directly. Setting the Basic authentication with correct credentials was also not accepted by the remote service where it was expecting to receive Negotiate or NTLM authentication.

I ended up using GetRobotCredential to pull the credentials from an asset in orchestrator. I then added the credentials as a domain credential into the Windows Credential Manager using the Add credential activity setting the persistence to Session so it is destroyed after the current session is complete. With the domain credentials saved in WCM, you don’t need to provide any other authentication properties.

If the goal is to interact with the Orchestrator API from the automated process/robot, I might suggest using the Orchestrator HTTP Request activity which authenticates using the robot which the process is executed on, assuming the Robot role has the appropriate permissions in Orchestrator and it suits your needs.

There have also been a few times when I leveraged the RestSharp package to programmatically interact with a Restful service where I might find the HTTP Request activity to be limiting.

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