At Intuit, we strongly believe feedback is a gift. Over the past few months we collected feedback from our developer community and incorporated their comments about their pain points with our developer magic potion to bring to you the latest API Explorer. The new API Explorer is designed keeping Intuit’s Design for Delight principles and our third party developers in mind. Read on to learn more before you explore our new API Explorer.
How to access the new API Explorer
In order to access the new API Explorer, go to API Docs & Tools and choose the API Explorer you would like to try from the Tools section.
3 Panel Design
Now that you know how to get to it, lets go over the new design. The API Explorer is now divided into 3 panels. The first panel contains improved grouping of entities. Based on user feedback we have categorized them as “Most commonly used” entities, a list of all “Report entities”, and “E-Commerce” specific entities. The “All entities” category, like the name suggests, contains a list of all of the API entities. Each entity is further subdivided by functionality such as read, create, query, update etc. The dropdown at the top of the first panel helps to switch between API information for QuickBooks Online (Accounting), QuickBooks Payments, QuickBooks Desktop, and TSheets Time Tracking.
The second panel contains detailed description of the entity. This description contains information such as the data type of each attribute, clear distinction of what attributes are required for each function and region specific information. Some attributes are mandatory only for certain regions and this has been highlighted.
Since it’s always more convenient to have all related content juxtaposed, we introduced a workspace in the third panel where developers can see sample entity object structures, sample requests and respective response bodies for each of the API functionalities. You can also experiment with different kinds of requests by editing the request body and understand the potential response by using the “Try it” feature.
At the top of the third panel, a logged in user will see all their sandbox companies listed. This is extremely useful to make API calls directly to the chosen sandbox company. Next to the sandbox companies dropdown, you will also find another dropdown for API versions. This dropdown comes handy when you need to test and understand the changes between multiple API versions.
Now you are all set to log into developer.intuit.com and start playing around with our new API Explorer. Have fun exploring! Please feel free to leave your feedback as a comment on this post or share it on our Ideas page.
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