Limitations of the API browser

The API browser is highly useful for navigating the API.   It lets you see available endpoints and collections in a visual way.   However, there are many things you can’t see using the API browser, and methods that are not available there.   The API browser is highly useful in helping you understand the structures with which you will interact, but it isn’t the tool you’ll likely rely on to do so.

We should also note that the API browser doesn’t easily expose all the functionality available in the Spire API.   It is useful for basic browsing, and uncovering structure, but you’ll want to use other tools for performing other kinds of work.

Tools like POSTman (https://www.postman.com/) and Fiddler (https://www.telerik.com/fiddler) are great tools for navigating API information.

For our own internal QA work, and for training purposes Spire uses curl (https://curl.haxx.se/) but there are many alternatives.   We will use Curl here since it’s a relatively easy method of differentiating the tools from the work that the Spire API performs.

Lastly, if your intention to to automate some aspect of your interaction with Spire accounting, you’ll almost certainly be using a program language and framework to do so.   The might be Microsoft Visual Studio with C# and RestSharp.   It might be Python with Qt and a different IDE.   The key thing to remember is that the Spire API operates in the way we’ll discuss, regardless of the method you use to access it.