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External API

External APIs are how Chakra talks to the outside world. Using this you can model any kind of an API integration on our system. It is as simple as using as a http client like postman or insomnia. External APIs help you fetch/send data from your internal applications or other software products.

HTTP methods​

External API supports the standard http methods

  • GET
  • POST
  • PUT
  • PATCH
  • DELETE
  • OPTIONS
  • HEAD

Request Body Type​

Standard http request body types are supported. List below:

  • NONE
  • JSON
  • FORM-MULTIPART
  • XML
  • FORM-URL-ENCODED

Other configurations​

You can also configure

  • request headers
  • query parameters

Request/Response Transform​

Both request and response payloads can be transformed using our standard transformers framework. For extreme usecases you may also chose to use JSONata. This is particularly useful when the external data format is incompatible with Chakra's data format. JSONata is turing complete meaning you can write arbitrary logic to do your transformations

Caching​

You may chose to enable caching in your external apis. This is especially useful when the data being fetched only changes infrequently and slightly stale data doesn't affect your business logic a lot. Cached apis are also faster - improving latencies and user experience

Error Alerts​

You may chose to set up error alerts so that you are alerted whenever an api is erroring out. Alerts are sent out as emails and can only be sent to users on Chakra. You can also custom define the error criteria for your API. By default a non-2xx response is treated as an error.

Logs​

External api requests and responses are logged. By default only errored out requests are logged. You may change this setting to log all requests