I'm trying to understand the correct sequence of steps followed by Gmail when loading and authenticating a contextual gadget. One of the reasons (there are others) is that I want to know whether I can make the gadget manifest behind a Open ID authentication so that only authenticated users will be able to pull the gadget in to Gmail.
I haven't seen any documentation on this anywhere. Here's how I think it works... (where mysite.com is an openID relying party).
User: clicks on a mail in Gmail inbox Gmail: Load email. Retrieve gadget manifest from mysite.com/gadgets/gadget.xml MySite: You need to be authenticated to access gadgets/gadget.xml Gmail: Here's the user's OpenID MySite: Here's gadgets/gadget.xml Gmail: "paints" the gadget contents on the context area of the email
Please correct me if this is wrong