Intro to the API

What is the AutoQL API?

The AutoQL API is a powerful and secure API for building and enabling conversational data experiences. Accessing our API allows developers to leverage the core service our technology enables: dynamically translating natural language to database query language(s).

Here's some facts about our API:

The AutoQL API is organized around REST.
Our API has predictable resource-oriented URLs, accepts and returns JSON-encoded request bodies, and uses standard HTTP response codes and verbs.
Our API is secured with JWT in conjunction with an API key.

What Principles Guide the API

1. The API should be completely secure and that security should be customizable to your needs

We use both API Keys and JSON Web Tokens to ensure that our API is secure. In our implementation of JWT, we even give you the ability to restrict the token's access to different parts of our API to ensure you have maximum control over what you expose to whom.

2. Errors should be helpful and transparent

As developers ourselves, we've worked with plenty of APIs in our time and nothing is more frustrating than experiencing opaque errors that completely block you from achieving the job you've set out to do. Whenever possible, we'll expose exactly as much debugging information as we're able to access/identify ourselves, to you directly.

3. Only own what we absolutely must to provide natural language queries

You may have noticed that we provide many open source resources for you to utilize (like our flexible front end implementations, Data Messenger and Dashboards). Our preference is to provide code for you to leverage in the way that serves you best, and only hide what we have to behind an API. We see this as a win-win; you get flexibility and customization options while maintaining ease in your implementation process, and we get to maintain a lean, focused, and secure API.

4. Meeting & exceeding modern web app table stakes.

We could have filled this list with platitudes about performance, design, availability, and all sorts of different buzzwords. But honestly, those are simply expected these days. They're table stakes. You can count on these best practices driving the development and support of our API on an ongoing basis.

What is the API used for?

The API is the fundamental interface to our AutoQL service. All configuration, management, and service provision is available through the API.

Who is the API for?

The API is designed for developers and product teams who wish to build freely on top of the natural language data querying experience we enable.

For everyone else, we offer flexible open source widgets that can be implemented in your application or solution wherever and however you like, and we've also built out a robust Integrator Portal that allows developers to manage their AutoQL deployment with ease.

If you have a burning idea or a unique vision you're keen to implement, everything we used to build those widgets is also available to you through the API.

How can the API be accessed?

Currently, the API is only directly accessible through HTTPS calls.

Our open source Widgets also utilize the API to deliver it's functionality in drop-in-place front end components.

Navigating the AutoQL API

API specification can be found in the API Reference section of these docs.