Considerations¶

The following are some general considerations about this API that must be taken into account before consuming the service.

Compatibility¶

This service exposes a RESTful API designed to be backwards-compatible (whenever possible). An API is said to be backwards-compatible if a client written against a previous version of the API will keep working against future ones.

The following changes are considered backwards compatible:

Adding new resources (on new URIs)
Adding new optional request form fields or JSON properties
Adding new optional query parameters
Adding new JSON properties to existing API responses
Changing the order of JSON properties on existing API responses
Changing the order of items on JSON object or array properties (unless the documentation states they are ordered)
Adding new optional headers in requests
Adding new headers in responses

The following changes are considered backwards incompatible (breaking changes):

Removing API resources
Renaming API resources (changing URIs)
Adding new required request form fields, JSON properties, query parameters or headers
Making any existing optional request form fields, JSON properties, query parameters or headers required
Removing existing request form fields, JSON properties, query parameters or headers
Changing the meaning of existing request form fields, JSON properties, query parameters or headers
Adding new request form fields, JSON properties, query parameters or headers that alter the meaning of existing ones
Changing the type of existing request form fields or JSON properties (from string to number for example)
Changing the format or maximum length of existing opaque string properties with documented conflicting constraints

Backwards incompatible (breaking) changes may be introduced by bumping the API version, as explained on the Versioning section. In this scenario, previous versions of the API may be marked as deprecated and stop receiving new features. Should this happen, these old versions will be available for some agreed period of time, until they are eventually removed.

Veridas will announce in advance this deprecation and removal process (also called sunsetting) to ensure that users have enough time to migrate to the newest version of the API without causing any downtime or service disruptions.

Authentication¶

This service sits behind a gateway responsible for authenticating end users and routing requests. The authentication method is API key based.

Requests¶

The application/json content type is accepted in every request, and some requests also accept multipart/form-data.
The document files sent to eSign must be pdf.
The image files sent to eSing must have a format extension (.jpg, .png). Many other formats may work fine, but there is not proper working guarantee nor support for them.
The API is HTTP-based and uses SSL everywhere with valid certificates. For security reasons, customers should never trust VeriSaaS endpoints exposing invalid certificates
Endpoints attempt to conform to the design principles of Representational State Transfer (REST).
The service includes an alive endpoint that returns the 204 HTTP status code if the service is up and running. This can be used to check the service’s health by applying for the appropriate permissions first..
Each request is uniquely identified, which might be helpful to trace support cases. This unique id is returned in the x-request-id header. The format of the unique id is a UUID in its hexadecimal form.

In general, API responses are encoded using JSON, regardless of the accepted content-type specified by the client. Also, certain responses like the ones regarding the files (images, documents, etc.) retrieval, are just the binary of the file itself. Responses will return a suitable HTTP status code indicating if the request was successful (200, 201 or 204 if nothing else is returned) or not (any other code). Responses will also include a code field in the JSON body that can provide more information about the concrete error on each case.

In general, successful responses will have the following format:

Create, update, and delete requests, return a json containting the record of the entity.
HTTP Status: 200 OK
```
    {
        DATA
    }
```

Requests that retrieve a list, return a json with the following fields:

HTTP Status: 200 OK

    {
        "page_number": int,
        "num_pages": int,
        "page_size": int,
        "total_results": int,
        "results": []
    }

In case of error:

When there is a validation error, it returns info about the fields that are raising it.

HTTP Status: 422

    {
        "detail": [
            {
            "loc": [
                "string",
                0
            ],
            "msg": "string",
            "type": "string"
            }
        ]
    }

When other errors are captured

    {
        "detail": "string"
    }

Example:

HTTP Status: 409

    {
        "detail": "Library document already exists with this name in this group."
    }

Versioning¶

The API version will be included in the URL, after the base url and before the endpoint:

https://< base_url >/<service>/**v{number:integer}**/<endpoint>

Non-backwards compatible changes will cause a version increment. As of now, the API only supports the v1 version.