vFire has two Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs), which enable you to develop programs that automate many common vFire transactions. This section of the documentation deals with the RESTful Alemba API, introduced in 9.7. For more information on the Classic (vFire) API, see here.
The Alemba API has been introduced as part of a new generation of product software that will offer greater functionality and an improved user experience.
It a RESTful API, and as such, is entity centric – it exposes all the entities within vFire, and the verbs that can be used to manipulate those entities follow the same standard pattern.
What is a RESTful API?
A RESTful API is an Application Programming Interface that follows REST (or Representational State Transfer) principles to allow one system to manipulate data on another. REST is a widely used protocol that provides a wide range of benefits over older protocols, such as performance, scalability and simplicity.
The Alemba API is self-documenting, in that you can discover more detail about how to use the API from the API itself.
The API fits within the vFire Core architecture, as described in Alemba API Architecture. It comes as standard with all vFire versions from 9.7. See Installing the Alemba API for more details.
The Alemba API explorer is the interface to the API. You are required to log in, as described in Logging In to the Alemba API Explorer, and can then examine the entities with vFire, as explained in Navigating the Alemba API Explorer.
Once you are familiar with the explorer, you may wish to investigate the programmatic opportunities, in the Alemba API Programmers’ Guide. The Alemba API Programmers' Cookbook contains information on how to use the API to create well-formed Alemba objects; and the Alemba API Cookbook - Recipes section contains further instruction and examples of programming in use. Finally, you may wish to be aware of the database tables that contain the metadata driving the API, which are listed in Alemba API Related Database Tables.