The Brightidea Application Programming Interface (API) allows you to access your data that was created using Brightidea On Demand Products. The API can be used for creating advanced reports to creating and updating user profiles.

Our API uses a method known as Representational State Transfer (REST). It is a simple protocol based on requesting data in the form of an HTTP request, and receiving the data back in an XML format.

All sensitive information including your key is encrypted using SSL during transmission between your network and Brightidea’s. Access is protected through the use of a key we issue to you. Please contact your Account Services representative for a key.

To ensure good response time for all requests, API accounts will be limited to the amount of data they can access in a given request and hour. There is a limit on the number of rows returned from each List call and the number of calls which can be made per hour. An API call using the method bi.api.get will return the number for both of these limits. If you need to access more data from a List call than the maximum rows allowed per call from your account, be sure to use the SQL query and perform multiple calls to ensure all data is retrieved.

All API calls will return data using UTF-8 encoding. Additionally, all user entered data (i.e. screen names, idea descriptions, etc..) will be wrapped in CDATA tags to ensure that no user entered data will disrupt the XML formatting.

If the API has encountered an error, it will return the error message in XML format. Here is an example of a possible error:

< ?xml version = "1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ERROR>
     <ID>12345678</ID>
     <CODE>1</CODE>
     <DESCRIPTION>Invalid or expired BI API key.</DESCRIPTION>
</ERROR>