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api-intro.rst

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Summary and Conventions

Authentication

Some actions in OpenSpending require authentication, particularly those that write to the system or aim to access protected data (e.g. pre-publication datasets). For this purpose, each user is provided an API key. The key is displayed in the Settings mask and can be used to perform HTTP Basic-style authentication:

Authorization: ApiKey f47ac10b-58cc-4372-a567-0e02b2c3d479

JSON-P Callbacks

All API calls that return JSON support JSON-P (JSON with padding). You can add a ?callback=foo parameter to any query to wrap the output in a function call. This is used to include JSON data in other sites that do not support CORS:

$ curl http://openspending.org/cra.json?callback=foo

foo({
  "description": "Data published by HM Treasury.", 
  "name": "cra", 
  "label": "Country Regional Analysis v2009", 
  "currency": "GBP"
});

This can be used in remote web pages to include data as a simple script tag:

<script>
  function foo(data) { 
    alert(data.label); 
  }
</script>
<script src="http://openspending.org/cra.json?callback=foo"></script>

Cross Origin Resource Sharing

The API does not yet support CORS but support will be added in the near future.