Introduction to the Easy Insight API

There's a vast spectrum of potential data out there--we try to make it as easy as possible to instantly pull data from common sources, but there's far more out there than we've ever going to be able to build for. To make our system as extensible as possible, we offer a data API that allows you to publish in your custom data. This API is delivered through SOAP, secured by basic authentication. We do offer a WS-Security API as well for Professional and higher accounts, but for this discussion, I'm going to stick to basic auth.

You can take a look at some information on the API at https://www.easy-insight.com/app/#page=apis. Conceptually, there are two APIs offered by Easy Insight, the Unchecked API and the Validated API. The Unchecked API is the quick development API. If you pass in a data source name of XYZ with a string field called Customer and a number field called Revenue to the Unchecked API, it will go ahead and dynamically create a data source for you called XYZ with a grouping called Customer and a measure called Revenue. Meanwhile, the comparable use of the Validated API would require that you already have a data source called XYZ, with a Customer grouping and a Revenue measure, and would reject any web service calls you made that didn't match with this signature.

From a quick development perspective, the Unchecked API is great for getting prototype code up and running in no time. However, for production code, you'll want to use the Validated API--it reduces the risk of error, and does have better overall performance. Further examples on the blog will show the use of both APIs.