Forum Discussion

ChristopherGre3's avatar
ChristopherGre3
Qrew Trainee
5 years ago

RESTful APIs and User-Agent

Hi,
What is the User-Agent and how would I generate one?

Thanks

------------------------------
Christopher Greene
------------------------------
  • Well, I used Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) as the user agent, but I also used my own proper name. Both worked. 
    ...

    Thanks,

    ------------------------------
    Christopher Greene
    ------------------------------
    • hhersch's avatar
      hhersch
      Quickbase Staff
      Hey Christopher. You can read more about what a user agent is at this helpful link from Mozilla. In short, they are used in every web request to indicate the type of software making the request. In many cases, its just your browser version. If you were to make the call from Pipelines, that would have its own user agent. Because those are so helpful in troubleshooting issues, we surfaced it in the new APIs to encourage people to be passing one. If you use an SDK for example, those usually automatically fill them in with something like "MyNodeSDK/V1.1". If you used Qunect, that passes the user agent to us. But if you wrote your own code and hosted it somewhere, it probably isn't generating it out of the box. So the best thing to do is pass something descriptive. Let's say you built a piece of software to generate monthly invoices and your company name was GreeneCo. You might create a user agent like "GeeneCo/V1.2". By doing that, our teams are able to quickly identify where things are coming from and help you more effectively when you have questions.​​

      ------------------------------
      Harrison Hersch
      ------------------------------