Using Talis JSON APIs

Background

Talis' newest APIs are secured using OAuth 2.0 access tokens. This article explains what you need in order to access them and how to make authenticated requests. 

The Canada urls are slightly different

In this article we will be giving examples using the `talis.com` urls, but for Canadian institutions all `talis.com` urls become `ca.talis.com`. So:

https://rl.talis.com becomes https://rl.ca.talis.com

https://users.talis.com becomes https://users.ca.talis.com

Basic authentication flow

• Get a client ID and client secret from Talis - you can request this by asking Talis Support by raising a new ticket.  
• Use the client id and secret to request an access token from https://users.talis.com/oauth/tokens - the access token will last for approximately 30 minutes, but could be revoked at any time. Your application should expect to request a new access token when the existing token expires.
• Use the access token to make requests to the API. 

Basic flow with examples using cURL

First request a token using your client_id and client_secret

Then use the access_token from the JSON response as the token in a request to the APIs for example:

Here is a useful shell script to easily request a token and echo out just the token into some other shell based curl command.

And here is an example of how you might use the shell script to simplify your access of the API.