Application Program Interface or API’s can be used to sync data in real-time between different IT and software systems. For example, a Company may have a Human Resources Management System or Active Directory that needs to sync employee names between systems to avoid manual entry and ensure data consistency across the company.
eCompliance supports batch uploads via Excel for employee records, however, many clients will want updates between systems to be instantaneous for data that is 1) constantly changing daily/weekly, and 2) essential to keep consistent between systems for reporting purposes. API’s fulfil this mission.
API’s must be appropriately scoped, planned and executed between your technical staff and eCompliance’s development team. Many companies using eCompliance have very specific ways they want to integrate information with eCompliance so it’s up to your stakeholders to communicate their requirements. Often, we’ve found that companies already have HR/ERP systems in-house that contains employee information (firstname, lastname, employee ID, email address, title or role) so they don’t want to manually duplicate this information in eCompliance and keep it in sync. Your HR/ERP system is the centre of truth for active employee information so you want to make sure that eCompliance knows about them on a daily/weekly basis (new employees added, existing employees moved, employees terminated). If you need assistance with planning out your integration with eCompliance please contact us and we’ll walk you through how our other customers have used our API to keep information in sync and remove duplication, or to simply read their data into another system like your company’s data warehouse.
Common Questions & Answers
1. What is the cost of using the API?
Please contact your Customer Success Manager or Sales Executive for pricing. There are ongoing maintenance, infrastructure, support, monitoring and enhancements that are part of the offering. Automation of data between your systems using an API ensures optimum operational efficiency by reducing duplication and improving data integrity. Use our API to reduce the costs of manual error-prone data entry and integrate with your existing ERP systems to have consolidated data be your competitive advantage.
2. What are the daily API limits for “API calls”?
The API is not currently rate-limited; we allow an unlimited number of requests per minute. However, we reserve the right to limit requests for specific resources in order to maintain a high quality of service for all customers. If you have additional questions about rate limiting, please contact us.
3. What security measures are in place?
The API requires that all communication takes place over HTTPS. Calls made over plain HTTP will fail for security reasons. You must authenticate for all requests. We use tokens that expire to authenticate access to the API.
4. High level: How do we use it (how will you call the API?)
The eCompliance API is a RESTful, HATEOAS-enabled interface for accessing your eCMS data in JSON or XML format over CRUD HTTP methods. The API is intended to provide secure, predictable resource-based URLs making it simple to rapidly develop web and desktop applications that integrate with eCompliance.
5. High level: What does it return (what the API returns back?)
JSON is the preferred data interchange format for the eCompliance API, and all requests will return JSON by default. XML is also supported, and the desired format can be specified by HTTP Header. The API makes use of the standard set of HTTP response codes to indicate the success/failure of requests. Where possible, errors will return information in the response about why the request failed.
6. How does it work? What do I need on my end?
You will need a developer on your side to write a custom application (aka a client or API broker or middleware) that can communicate with our API and the customer ERP system, application, database (sometimes they also have an API) to get and update information from our system, and vice-versa. It also depends what information you have that you want to share (keep up to date) and what information you need from eCompliance (data backups?) to flow back into your ERP systems.
7. How does it get turned on?
Companies wishing to use the API must contact us to have it turned on for their organization.
8. Where can I find full documentation?
- API documentation: https://api.ecompliance.com/swagger/ui/index
- API schema: api.ecompliance.com/swagger/docs/v1
- Please note all existing endpoints published in the documentation are the ones that are available. If your company requires additional endpoints to do something other than what we already support, please contact us for assessment and potential project engagement.
- Once you obtain the API auth token, it's "grab and go!" - the token will expire after 24hrs, and you will need to renew it after that period.
9. Do you provide a staging environment for us to test once we’re a client?
Yes, we can provide a replica of your account in a staging environment to allow you to test the API without impacting your production data. This can be provided at an additional cost and can be refreshed with production data on a monthly basis - please reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information.
Please contact your Customer Success Manager to get started.
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