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Introduction to APIs

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A lot of people toss around the phrases like "open APIs" or "robust APIs," without really knowing what an API is. For anyone who is new to APIs or hasn't used them, here's an introduction.

API definition

An Application Programming Interface is a way to interact with a system or software without going through a graphical user interface (UI). The key thing to realize about the Xandr API, and most of the APIs you'll encounter, is that:

In the end, all the Xandr APIs do is read, write, update, and delete things in our databases.

At Xandr, these things include campaigns, segments, platform members, line items, inventory categories, reporting data, etc. If you had access to our database directly, you could go in and manually look at or add these things. Customers don't have that direct access both for logistical and information security reasons, so they use our API commands instead. The APIs also have nice search, filter, and other capabilities built in; if you want to search for one of your campaigns with the name "Cheese_of_month", you can do that with an API request rather than using a MySQL query of the database.

Example: New York Times API

The New York Times has a ton of APIs, but one of them is the Bestseller List API, which you can see documented here. Let’s say you want to post the list of bestsellers on your blog each week - you can auto-grab them with the API. The API also allows you to search and grab details about specific best sellers, including historical rank information and links to New York Times reviews and book excerpts. So if you wanted to post all bestselling books with “bird” in the title from the last 20 years, you could do that. Or you could build a button into your blog that when clicked returns the week's bestseller list, using a behind-the-scenes call to the New York Times API.

Now you could also go look on the New York Times's website, copy the list, and then manually type them into your blog. But wouldn't you rather automate this process?

Differences between an API and a UI

Many systems, such as the Xandr Console, or the Facebook advertising platform, have both a UI and an API. When using these systems, you might use only the UI, only the API, or a combination of both. You might use the API for the following reasons:

  • Automate certain functions, such as the examples above.
  • Bulk upload/modifications. You can write a script that creates several objects at once, or changes the names of all your objects at once.
  • Access info or features not available in the UI.
  • Get info in the right format to manipulate, such as a text-based comma-separated list.
  • Build your own UI. For example, let's say you want a simplified version that has a fraction of the feature set for simplicity of use.
  • Build tools that work with a system you have already created or use. Maybe you use another ad server and want to pull reports every day from Xandr into your ad server.
  • Personal preference. You may prefer the command line to clicking buttons.

Other nice things about APIs

  • APIs allow you to give out different kinds of permissions and track who is doing what.
  • APIs allow you to have unchanging face on changing datasets. If an organization changes their underlying data structure, the code of the API can be changed without the front-facing API commands changing.