Plaid Challenge 1 - Answer

gistfile1.txt

Hi Amy,

I'd be more than happy to help you getting up and running with Plaid. It can be a bit tricky in the beginning. 

The 'INVALID_CREDENTIALS' error means that the username or password provided to the financial institution were invalid. 
Therefore, in order to create an item, you need to provide valid credentials during the Plaid Link flow.
If you're getting started with the Sandbox Environment, you'll need to use the test credentials to connect your account 
successfully. The default credentials are:

username: user_good
password: pass_good

If you're setting up your application in development mode, you can test your Plaid integration with real credentials
and account data for up to 5 Items.

I hope this helps to clarify your first issue. Regarding your second question, I'm glad to explain the difference 
between a public_token and an access_token. 

A public_token is a one-time use token that expires after 30 minutes. This token is returned in your Link onSuccess() 
callback and should be passed to your server. The server handles the exchange of the public_token for the access_token.
The access_token is then used to make authenticated requests to the Plaid API and obtain product data for an Item. 
By default, access_tokens do not expire.

You can read more information about access_tokens and public_tokens here: 
https://plaid.com/docs/quickstart/#access_tokens-and-public_tokens.

Thank you for reaching out Amy, please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you. 
I’m always happy to help.

Ary