Need help with basic api integration -- do we have api keys?

[tatianajiselle]

Hey there!

I am a backend dev with senior level experience looking to help make an automated boarding process at the rescue i volunteer at. They are a paid Shelter Manager user and use the ASM hosting for their env.

Currently, im interesting in understanding the process for connecting an external service to the ASM backend.

When i log into the admin instance of shelter manager I see only accounts/users, i dont really see any API offerings.

So a few questions:

1. Do i need to create a service level "user" in order to log into the hosted instance my rescue runs?
2. If that is the case, Is it possible to create a read only "user"? Or what is the recommend way by you guys to create a server to server integration?
3. Im assuming once im authenticated, i should be able to make REST calls with the authentication token. How long does the login token last?
4. Do you have any general client api documentation or should i just generate that off the code base here?
5. Anything i didnt ask that you think is important for me before I begin the integration?

Thanks so much in advance!

~Tatiana

[bobintetley]

1. Yes
2. Yes, set "Can Login" to NO when creating the user. It also only needs "View animals" in its role or other basic permissions depending on the calls you want to make.
3. There is no rest token or state, the username and password are simply passed to the API endpoint as parameters. It should still be safe to do this even with client side javascript since the endpoints are all read only and you can set permissions on the user.
4. https://sheltermanager.com/repo/asm3_help/service.html

Good luck.

[tatianajiselle]

Hey Bob,

Thanks for your response. I would love your input on how to best achieve the following:

Our idea is to pull the boarding book each morning to get a list of boarders the shelter expects to check in and display it on our wordpress website.

we want to pull the following fields:
animal name, sex, boarding date range, owner name, vet info, any required medicine instructions

Ideally we want a workflow where a user can select their rabbit from the boarding book list for check in and upon selecting it generates a cage card (ideally via ASM).

We use ASM Hosted so we dont have the luxury of cross site origin calls and we have found a way to generate cage card using the report feature and service api. I thought I could make a html template for the boarding book but none of the fields are exposed from the table.

please help!

Best,
Tatiana

[bobintetley]

You could use the csv_report and html_report service calls to run any report and get the result either as CSV data or as a printable HTML report.

I'd use the csv_report to retrieve the boarding info that you want and html_report for printing your cage card. There are already cage card reports, which you can install and modify to suit. You could use the existing report "Boarded animals between two dates" to pull the boarding book for a period as CSV (or JSON if you prefer with json_report). You would have to modify it to add any fields you want that aren't already on there.

https://sheltermanager.com/repo/asm3_help/service.html#html-report
https://sheltermanager.com/repo/asm3_help/service.html#csv-mail-and-csv-report

Hope this helps.

[tatianajiselle]

Thank you a bunch! i was able to take the template from the repo and run it. I have been able to iterate on it using the existing examples to pull reports to my liking. It was extra helpful to know i can pull it as a json_report.

Thank you!!

[bobintetley]

You're welcome. Since your shelter is paying for support you can also email us at help@sheltermanager.com for a quicker response if you need anything in future!