Written by: Karen Suhaka | August 21, 2020

Part of the launch of the all new BillTrack50 was converting the API to a new framework. In particular you’ll notice a change from capital case to camel case as a result of updating the API to using a standard JSON serializer.  

When we first made our API available, JSON was in its infancy and there was no such thing as JSON serializers — we were just using WFC to serialize objects to strings. Unfortunately this means a side effect of our update to a standard serializer is that we needed to make a change to conform to the current norms and specifications of JSON. In the world of JSON there are generally 2 primary standards for attribute naming, those being “camelCase” and “snake_case”.  This change brings us more in line with industry standards and it also allows us to use a more robust library which has many rich features built into it and allows us to work faster and build better features. You can expect that the API will remain in camel case for the lifetime of the API and any future changes would come with a new API version, ample notice and supporting old API versions for a lengthy overlap of time.

All the API calls should still work at the same URLs, and take the same parameters. Any widgets should still function and communicate to the same endpoints as well. We did our utmost to achieve backwards compatibility despite the fact that under the covers almost everything has been modified to some extent. If you used the http response codes to evaluate the success/failure of the API call that is exactly the same also but there are additional details added to error responses when specific errors occur. We’ve added an array of details to specific errors that may occur such as authorization or parameter validation etc.

If you are currently using the API hopefully will find the improvements helpful  Of course we very much apologize for any disruption to changes to the API service that you experience as a result. Please do Contact Us if we can help in any way.

As a reminder you can see our API documentation here.  Also if you need to discuss the rate limits that’s a conversation we can have.

 

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash