Are you API about ServiceDesk Plus – Part 2?

Hopefully in Part 1 you’ve had a chance to review what kind of operations are available through using the API. The next challenge is to actually make the API work in practise.

First off to use the API interface you have to configure an API key against a technician account. This could be a suitable existing technician account or you could create a new technician account specifically for use with the API interface. Either way you will have to ensure the technician account has sufficient rights for the operations you want to perform using the API. 

In the Technician account Login Details there is an option to generate the API key:

When generating the API key there is an option to specify an expiry date for the key if required:








On generation details of the API key are displayed and should be recorded for use in programming the API interface:









So what now? 

It’s simply a case of building the appropriate HTTP method for the API operation we wish to use passing any necessary input data in the INPUT_DATA string, either directly or as a formatted JSON string (see Part 1). If we consider the same operation as before to view the details of a request the API documentation indicates we need the following details:




As a URL link this will look something like this, for a ServiceDesk Plus server IP address of 10.0.0.10, port 8888, and a request ID of 405: 

http://10.0.0.10:8888/sdpapi/request/405?TECHNICIAN_KEY=54AF3947-C62E-4B42-9A37-2A3EB7D8D9F7&OPERATION_NAME=GET_REQUEST

For an API operation that requires more by way of input data, such as adding a request, we can still perform this in a URL directly using XML formatted data for the INPUT_DATA string, as given in the example below:











When entered into an Internet browser you should get a result similar to the following:















Next time we’ll take a look at performing an API operation programmatically.

Enjoy!