Status of the API documentation

Problem reported by Richard Cooper 10 years ago

The ClearBooks API seems to be very poorly documented.

Less that 40% of the API is documented at all. The documentation lists 12 methods. Parsing the WSDL file shows that there are actually 32 methods available. And the methods which are documented are documented poorly. For example:

  • The createpayment() method takes three parameters which are not documented - project, fxRate and bsAccount.
  • The docs for listEntities() says "See entity from updateEntity" but there is no documentation for updateEntity
  • If I go by the documentation for createEntity() to get an idea of what listEntities() returns then the documentation is missing all of the bank information which is returned - accountNumber, sort code, name, bankName.
  • The listAccountCodes() method returns a "default_vat_rate" param which is listed in the documentation as a "string" but with no description of the format of the contents. Sure, it's easy to guess what default_vat_rate='0.175' means. But what about default_vat_rate='' or default_vat_rate='0.00:Out'

And that's just from the small amount of testing I've done so far with the API. I've only really looked at those 3 methods.

1 Reply

Hi Richard

Clearbooks do have a REST API in addition to the SOAP one but it's not public yet, they use it for their mobile app so it must be fairly new. I was talking to Tim the other day about their API and they will be documenting it and releasing a better REST API but have not got round to it yet.

That probably doesn't help you right now but perhaps you can contact them and they will help you use the new REST API?

Regards James

Reply to this problem

Attach images by dragging and dropping or upload
 

Your comments will be public and can be answered by anyone in the Clear Books community.

Find out what we do and who we are