hhersch
5 years agoQuickbase Staff
Updates on our RESTful APIs
Fine print: this post discusses Quick Base features and functions that are currently in development. Quick Base has no obligation to deliver these features and they may be unstable.
If you are not yet involved in our beta program for the RESTful APIs, please make sure you register based on the instructions in our release notes. We are slowly inviting people in. If you are exceptionally passionate about working with us on this topic and being part of the cutting edge in Quick Base, please reach out to your account team at Quick Base so that they get in touch with the right people on our product team to advocate for you.Thanks to those of you that have been participating in this limited early access. We wanted to provide a brief update as to the progress.
First, I thought it was important to clarify that this is still a beta and not all features are there. We will be considering this production-ready in probably 6-8 weeks. That means the most commonly used APIs will be present to start and we will slowly burn down more and more based on our prioritization process. The large bucket of APIs we will tackle as a fast follow to GA will be around user/role/group management. Our main focus though is quality and depth. We are not only making sure these APIs are ready for the future, but also looking back at nearly 20 years of feedback in the form of cases and bugs to make decisions on improvements.
Throughout the beta on these APIs, we have received some great feedback. So, first, I’ll address the quality of life items we have improved as a direct result of what you all told us. :
- It was screaming loud and clear that we needed to make it simpler to deal with how you enter your realm. We will soon accept either "demo" or "demo.quickbase.com".
- The middle pane bounces back to the top of the page as you click to other pages.
- A few people got confused with the Content-Type header so we simplified it and just insert it for you if it isn't included.
- You told us you needed more clarity on what page you were visiting in the portal. Done!
Since our first post on the APIs, we added the ability to get field usage summary data back. And with the upcoming release, we are making those API calls significantly faster. For the past few weeks, the team has had two parallel efforts:
- More quality of life improvements: this means things like more detailed error handling, bug squashing, etc.
- Added functionality: net new endpoints.
Coming in, roughly, the next two weeks are the following goodies.
- The quality of life improvements and bug fixes mentioned above.
- Create, edit, and delete fields.
- Create, edit, and delete tables.
- A brand new temporary authentication mechanism that allows you to securely use the APIs from JavaScript without hardcoding credentials.
- (...drum roll...) Downloading batches of audit logs with some limited filtering.
One additional thing that is a new concept for us - we are exploring adding some new response headers that will indicate our rate-limiting policies and how many calls are left for what time period for the submitter. While we have always had rate limiting to protect our platform and our customers, we want to be transparent about those and help our builders create awesome experiences that factor in industry best practices. That includes retry and backoff processes. Rather than waiting for an error from us (an HTTP 429), you could monitor these headers and slow down calls if needed. You can even use these for logging and analytics. In practice, we expect these to help:
- ...our builders to be able to go the extra mile for an awesome user experience, using this meta-data to drive messaging to users in a custom interface.
- ...our builders create integrations and extensions that utilize the information to self-throttle and send alerts and alarms to support staff to better manage issues proactively.
Up next, we will likely be shifting focus back onto production readiness. That means making sure these APIs can handle the hundreds of millions of calls we know you are ready to throw at them, going through some final pre-flight security checks, training all of our teams and planning for our post-GA roadmap.
Please keep beating these up. The feedback has been great, and we can't wait to hear more from you.
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Harrison Hersch
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