Introduction and Authentication

Components are fully-integrated, customisable UI building blocks that can be used to build smart charging experiences within your app. They’re built on top of Axle’s existing API and allow your customers to onboard their smart assets easily. Axle also provides a pre-built “best-practice” smart charging app, which is designed to be embedded as a tab or seperate page in an existing app.

The components are open source and built using React. You can either use them directly, or use our fully-hosted option and embed Components in your app through iFrame or mobile web views. Both options provide full theming customisation, and you can pick and choose which components to use.

The smart charging app is available as a hosted option only, as Axle manages the whole customer integration for you.

Choosing a rendering option

	React components	Hosted components	Smart charging app
Customisable theming	✅	✅	✅
Plug and play	❌ - Use in existing React website	❌ - You pick the components to use	✅ - Axle provides the whole smart-charging flow
Build my own flow	✅ - Use what you need in an existing app	✅ - Embed what you need in an existing app	❌
Enhance an existing React app	✅ - Drop in Axle React components	❌	❌

Authentication

Regardless of how you choose to render, you’ll need to obtain an end-user scoped component token that can be used to authenticate API calls made from the frontend. This is a token scoped to a specific user for use with components only, and must be created using your org scoped token.

To get your org scoped auth token, follow the authentication guide.

Never use your org scoped token in an untrusted environment, including all client side code.

To generate an end user scoped token, you’ll need to specify an external_user_id and allowed_origin. These are required so Axle can reconcile your end users with the entries in our database, and to ensure that redirects or iFrame embeddings can only happen on domains you control.

You can obtain a component token by calling the /auth/component-token/ endpoint:

Request

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://api.axle.energy/auth/component-token' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_ORG_SCOPED_TOKEN>' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -d 'external_user_id=<YOUR_USER_ID>&allowed_origin=<YOUR_TRUSTED_ORIGIN>'

Response

{ "access_token": "eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiIxMjM0NTY3ODkwIiwibmFtZSI6IkpvaG4gRG9lIiwiYWRtaW4iOnRydWUsImlhdCI6MTUxNjIzOTAyMn0.KMUFsIDTnFmyG3nMiGM6H9FNFUROf3wh7SmqJp-QV30" }

Refreshing tokens

Component tokens are valid for one hour. You should regenerate component tokens before this to ensure user flows aren’t interrupted.