Activity 1 - Get all Students in the Sandbox

In this activity, we will run a GET call on the /ed-fi/students endpoint.

1. Open a separate browser window and go to our public Ed-Fi API v5.3 sandbox. Other API versions can be found at https://api.ed-fi.org.
2. In the top right corner, click on the "Authorize" button, and click on the "Authorize" button on the popup window. This authorizes your browser to communicate with this API.
3. Scroll down to the "students" API resource and click on it. This opens up documentation of all methods available on the /ed-fi/students API resource
4. Click on the first "GET" in the list that appears. This expands the info on the GET operation. In it, you can see an example of the JSON object to expect when you do a GET.
5. Click the "Try it Out" button.
6. Scroll down and click the "Execute" button.
7. You will see info that looks like this appear.

Congratulations, you just completed your first API call to an Ed-Fi API!

If you received a different response, check the response code and response body for these issues

Read on to learn a bit about the transaction.

What you sent

In this activity, your browser sent a request to the API using an HTTP GET operation. That transaction was sent a URL that looks like this:

https://api.ed-fi.org/v5.3/api/data/v3/ed-fi/students

Further, that request included the access token (a "Bearer" token) you created earlier, sent in the header of the HTTP request. You can see that in the Web page under the "CURL" section, which will look like this:

--header 'Authorization: Bearer [some long string of letters and numbers]'

You did this via the HTTP GET method.

What you received

You got back a few different things, all in an HTTP response package. What you got back:

1. A response code
2. Response headers
3. A response body

The response code (or more accurately, the response status code) is from a standardized list of HTTP response codes and tells you what the outcome was. Hopefully you received a "200", which means success.

The response headers were the headers on the server's response back to you. They provide information that might be of interest to you, but in this case you can mostly ignore them. In other cases, they can contain important info.

The response body is the main event here! This is the data you wanted: info on the assessments available. There is a lot to look at here, but we will focus on a few items only.

• This item is formatted in JSON, a simple yet common language for formatting data objects. Note that a full discussion of JSON is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
• Note that the response is a JSON array. You can tell this by the JSON beginning with a bracket "[" and ending with one. You received a collection because you asked the API for all assessments available.
• Within the array, each assessment is available as a JSON object denoted by curly braces "{" and "}", separated by commas.
• Each assessment JSON has a number of fields and sub-objects as part of it.
• Finally, note that you may not have received all assessments. APIs commonly limit the number of items returned so that the client is not overwhelmed. In this case, you probably received 25 items, the API's default. To get more items, you would make a new request for the next 25 items.