What is an API/REST API?

An “API” is an Application Programming Interface and it is a means of allowing one computer program to talk to another computer program securely. A “REST” API is a common form of API that communicates using web standards and are often the basis for web interfaces. Mediasite includes an open REST API command set that you can use to expand your Mediasite Video Platform in a variety of ways.

Some common uses for the Mediasite API are:

• Generating playback tickets to securely allow playback of Mediasite content in other websites (custom LMS integration, PPV, etc).
• Creating Mediasite schedules programmatically from an existing room scheduling system.
• Managing Mediasite content and or tracking Mediasite reporting data in an external system.

What can you do with an API?

When using a REST API, you communicate to the service using the common web standard “verbs”. Your browser is constantly using these same verbs every time you load a website to do things like GET a website, POST a comment back to the server, or PATCH to change an email address at a website.

GET: This is a read only command to receive information back from a system. This is generally the safest type of command, as it is usually not creating or changing the system. For safety, we will mostly focus on this type of command in the following examples.

POST: This is a command to create something on the system you are connecting to. Examples could be creating new presentations or creating a new Mediasite Channel.

PUT: This is a command to update or change an existing entry and updating all fields. An example could be updating a presentation to have new metadata.

PATCH: This is a command to update only a specific field. This is similar to PUT but a PUT command requires sending in all of the fields from the element you are updating, with a PATCH command you can only update a single field. For example, if you wanted to change only the title of a presentation, you could do that easily with a PATCH command.

DELETE: This is a command to delete something. Of course, this can be risky, as you could delete something inadvertently.

What format is the data returned as?

Most Mediasite API responses use the JSON format, or JavaScript Object Notation. This is a standard format that is easy for a computer to read, but still legible to a human without needing to decode it. The best way to understand the JSON data format is to look at an example.