401 Unauthorized error when using CosmosDB REST APIs

Since Cosmos DB provides REST APIs to query their data, the process needs to be handled carefully while generating the authentication token.

Though I won't go into the depth of creating an authentication token, if you're having this 401 Unauthorized error, there's a high chance that something is wrong with the string used to create the authentication token.

Let's look at the possible scenarios.

• Create a new Document: As you can see from the documentation, we don't need any doc-id or doc-name for this. So, the string used to generate auth token should be dbs/{db-name}/colls/{coll-name}/docs. And then it's simply a POST request.

• In all other cases when you require a doc-id or doc-name, the string will be different. In case of doc-id, the string will be dbs/{db-name}/colls/{coll-name}/docs/{doc-id} whereas in the case of doc-name, the string will be doc-name only.

Note: For APIs that require doc-name as mentioned in the documentation, you can also use doc-id.

A more detailed solution can be found in this stack overflow answer.

I hope that it helps.