The Web service endpoints are the best way for developers to interact with and extend the Telligent Evolution platform (and the applications built on top of it: Telligent Community 5.5 and Telligent Enterprise 2.5). In my next couple of blog posts, I am highlighting key enhancements and a few tips and tricks. In this post, I will discuss a core updates we shipped in the Telligent Community 5.5 and Telligent Enterprise 2.5 releases. 

Required File Extensions

Previously, you could execute a Web service request without a file extension. By default, we would return the results in xml. This led to difficulty deciphering exactly what was requested and what to expect in return. Starting with Telligent Evolution Platform 5.5, we now require you to include a file extension for all Web service requests. Service endpoints that already existed will continue to work, but all new endpoints will require extensions. For those of you who wrote code against this release, this should be a very minor change and we highly recommend you make it for your next release.

Before:

/api.ashx/v2/users/2114/statuses

Now:

/api.ashx/v2/users/2114/status.xml

 

Users by Name

The Telligent Evolution platform 5.0 version of the Web service API required all single user look-up be done by user ID:

/api.ashx/v2/users/21114

The work-around (which still works) was to execute a user query:

/api.ashx/v2/users?usernames=scottw

While you can still use the query above, in Telligent Evolution platform 5.5, you can now work with a single user by his or her username:

/api.ashx/v2/scottw.xml

/api.ashx/v2/scottw/statuses.xml

In many cases, this will save you a request or two to the server and should make your code much simpler.

 

Authorization Updates

We previously supported a form of authentication we called "pass through." If a user was already authenticated, the Web service request would not require the presence of a Web service token. Our security team determined that this was not an ideal way to operate long-term and recommended we make a change to increase security.

This results in two minor changes necessary to deploy services under Telligent Evolution Platform 5.5:

  1. If you were using pass-through authentication in a widget (generally with JSON), you now need to include the value from the AuthorizationCookie cookie in the header Rest-Authorization-Code in your Ajax requests. See an example of how to do this.

  2. If you are using LDAP authentication, you will now need to include the API key header along with a user's credentials. Learn how to generate an API key.

 

Read the full documentation.