Welcome to the new Developer Portal!

Note: As of October 23, 2019 the new Developer Portal will be available to all developers.

Over the past few months the Intuit Developer team has been hard at work updating our Developer Portal. We’ve moved the platform to AWS, improved navigation, created a new look and feel and streamlined workflows. This post provides a high level overview of the major updates and over the next week and a half we will do a deep dive into a couple of the features – so be sure to come back and read those posts as well. The new Developer experience will be available to developers exclusively using OAuth 2.0.

Note to OAuth 1.0 Apps: If you have not yet migrated all your users to OAuth 2.0 you will remain on the previous Developer experience. Once all your users have been migrated to OAuth 2.0 you will be moved to the new Developer.Intuit.Com experience.

Still seeing the old experience and believe you have migrated all your users to OAuth 2.0? Please open a support ticket here.

API Explorer

The API Explorer has a new design with this release. After reviewing your feedback and analyzing usage patterns, we redesigned the API Explorer to provide a more consolidated and holistic view. You can now view various entities with logical groupings and try for yourself, all in the same view. Here is a partial list of some of the design changes:

Entities are grouped to give you ease of use and aid search-ability – ‘Most commonly used’, ‘Report entities’ and ‘E-Commerce’. The collection ‘All entities’, as the name suggests has all of these together.
We provide a description of each attribute from the request body (middle panel below.)
You can try first-hand the sample requests to get the sample response or modify the sample request body and seek a response (right panel below.) The earlier plain text box for sample payloads has been converted into interactive code blocks that highlight syntactic errors to avoid sending erroneous payloads.
Once logged in, a user can directly access the Sandbox companies or production companies which are selectable from the top right corner.
The APIs can be executed against a particular minor version selectable from the dropdown in the top right hand corner which has been set to ‘latest’ by default.
All entities and transactions that are tried here, can be checked in the your Sandbox/production company as updates.
Response body shows the header being passed in case of a non-200 response along with an informative error message to better understand a bad request.
Reading the references and trying out the APIs is now possible on mobile and iPad devices.

Dashboard & App Management

With this release we have rolled out some highly requested changes for App management and the dashboard. The dashboard now lets you quickly glance at all your Apps, lists their various attributes and lets you easily navigate between your apps.

The App dashboard is totally revamped with the following prominent new features:

App listings by rows, where each row provides data at a glance regarding the QuickBooks product, OAuth type, number of connections and more.
The ability to delete apps that has no connections.
Easily filter by Apps built for QuickBooks Online vs QBMS.
The ability to add or remove columns as desired to give you the view you want.
The app dashboard was designed in a modular design that allows it to be scaled to multiple verticals, highlighting pertinent data in relation to the Intuit product that each app connects to.
Allows you to start the creation of a new app.

The App creation workflow also got a major upgrade with this release. The flow has been simplified, and walks you through the app creation process, letting you know what data needs to be provided each step of the way. Here is a list of the changes:

You are asked to choose the QuickBooks product (QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Merchant Services,) at the beginning of the process, which then drives the set-up experience.
We’ve streamlined process and ask for information only when it is needed.

The App page now includes the various attributes of each app such as Development and Production credentials, Sample Apps, Documentation and Coding language selection.
The App Landing page has been simplified to provide you with the right information, in the right context, to get started building your app. It follows the top-down navigation paradigm we have applied to the entire portal, where top-level selections of “language” and “scenario” cascade to what is being displayed below on the page, and helps our developers to determine next steps.
User can select the Apps from the top left corner and then procure Keys and OAuth tokens as well as see connection reports and specify the web-hooks endpoint.
One of the key pieces of the top-down navigation paradigm is the ability to easily switch between apps in a central location, by selecting them in the top left dropdown menu. This menu also acts as a reference point so that developers always know what app they are working on.

OAuth 2.0 Playground

The OAuth Playground is a brand new feature we are introducing based on your feedback! This allows awesome developers like you, to explore the OAuth 2 and OpenID connect process step by step by selecting a specific scope to check how these protocols work. We built this to help the app building process as we envision that you could ‘play’ around the protocols and check responses. A logged-in developer will be able to:

Specify the App to be used (can be a sandbox or production app).
Specify the Scope – one or multiple (Accounting, Payments, Open ID, etc.).

Get the Authorization code needed.

Get Access Token and make API calls.

Refresh Access token as needed.

We have also added functionality that allows a user to add a redirectUrl back to a selected app within the OAuth playground.

Please find more details on new OAuth 2.0 playground here. The OAuth 2.0 playground can be accessed here.

SandBox

The new Sandbox design was developed based on multiple developer interviews. During our conversations we learned about the many pain points you experience when using our Sandbox and have incorporated improvements to address the issues you shared.

Users can now create 10 sandboxes – up from 5!
Batch action is now available with the new design.
There is a flexible table where you can select/deselect which columns to display.
Detailed information is provided to the user for any broken company in QBO.

App Store review Submission

The App Store review submission process has been streamlined with this release. Once the email verification is done, the account profile is complete and the privacy policy url and EULA (End User License Agreement) url have been added, the app is ready to be submitted for the Technical, Security and Marketing reviews.

In order to make the app submission process as transparent and streamlined as possible, requirements to begin the process are shown up front, with easy access points to complete them. The three steps are: