Public API

Participedia Public API

Participedia expose our data via an API. To get started, please contact us to receive a free API key, which needs to be added to the HTTP header (API_KEY) to be able to access our API.

API

Participedia exposes a REST API that allows an authorized application perform HTTP GET operations to retrieve a paginated list of cases, methods or organization. The API request parameters are uniform across all three result types, but returned results are not uniform in structure.

Authorization

All requests to the API are required to be authorized using an API key. An unauthorized request or incorrectly authorized request will result in a 401 Unauthorized response code with the response below:

{
    "error": "Invalid Participedia API Key"
}

To authorize a request, set the API-KEY authorization header to your issued API key value. A NodeJS example request is given below:

const request = require('request');
const options = {
  'method': 'GET',
  'url': 'https://participedia.net/api/v1/cases',
  'headers': {
    'API-KEY': 'YOUR_API_KEY_HERE'
  }
};
request(options, function (error, response) {
  if (error) throw new Error(error);
  console.log(response.body);
});

Making a Request

All API requests are made to the base URL endpoint with the resource name and optional parameters. The API base URL endpoint is https://participedia.net/api/v1 and resource names can be one of /cases, /organizations or /methods. If none of the optional parameters are given, the API returns the latest 50 entries for the given resource. Otherwise, the API returns results that are filtered by the parameters.

Available parameters can be one or more of the options listed in the table below:

Parameter	Type	Default	Notes
skip	number	0	Number of entries to skip before selecting results to return.
limit	number	50	Maximum number of entries to return from the API. Maximum is 200
sortKey	string	post_date	Resource column name by which the returned response is sorted. To sort results in decending order a minus sign (-) is added before the sort key, otherwise, the result is sorted in ascending order. Note: The sort key may vary by resource type

A request to retrieve the oldest 50 methods, sorted by last updated date will look like below: https://participedia.net/api/v1/methods?skip=0&limit=50&sortKey=-updated_date

Note: Only English language results are currently returned by the API

Request Response

Success Response

Successful requests result in a 200 Ok response code that returns a JSON object with a single key that matches the requested resource' name, and a value that is a JSON array of requested resource values, For example, a request to fetch cases will return a JSON array in the format below:

    {
        "cases": [] // Array of cases
    }

Failure Response

An authorized request that fails will return a 400 Bad Request response code with a JSON object that is in the format below:

    {
        "error": "Error message" // Reason for request failure
    }