Why the param name is $accessToken? - google-drive-api

Question

Developers of the Drive SDK - or generally, the OAuth2.0 PHP client library!
In the apiClient.php there is a setAccessToken function:
public function setAccessToken($accessToken) {
if ($accessToken == null || 'null' == $accessToken) {
$accessToken = null;
}
self::$auth->setAccessToken($accessToken);
}
The #param of this function is something like this:
{"access_token":"TOKEN", "refresh_token":"TOKEN", "token_type":"Bearer",
"expires_in":3600, "id_token":"TOKEN", "created":1320790426}
Why you name this parameter $accessToken if the access token is just a part of this JSON encoded string ??
It's very misleading i think.
When we go deeper and look at: $auth->setAccessToken($accessToken); in apiOAuth2.php
we see:
public function setAccessToken($accessToken) {
$accessToken = json_decode($accessToken, true);
if ($accessToken == null) {
throw new apiAuthException('Could not json decode the access token');
}
if (! isset($accessToken['access_token'])) {
throw new apiAuthException("Invalid token format");
}
$this->accessToken = $accessToken;
}
Look at the second if: $accessToken['access_token']. Whats the point of this? Access token inside an accessToken ?? :)
You should name the $accessToken parameter (the whole JSON string) of these functions to something else like $credentials or whatever because it's a little bit blurry... but tell me if I'm wrong.

Answer 1

As some of the comments mention I would post this either on the Google APIs PHP client library form: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/google-api-php-client
Or file an issue on their issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/google-api-php-client/issues/list
This will make sure that the engineers working on the PHP client library will be aware of this.
And you are right this makes perfect sense :)