API¶

The OLDP API is based on Django’s Rest framework extension (with Django-Rest-Swagger).

Authenticating with the API¶

Reading our data is possible without logging in. However, be aware of a stricter throttle policy for anonymous users (see Throttle rates). Write operators require authentication for which two methods exist:

Username and password: Use HTTP BasicAuth to login with your login credentials.
API Key: In your user settings you can request a specific API key that allows you to authenticating with the API.

Throttle rates¶

Spending resources carefully is of high importance for a non-profit project like ours. Hence, we limit the usage of our API as following (taken from oldp/settings.py):

Anonymous users: 100 requests/day
Registered users: 5000 requests/hour

If you need to do more requests, check out our data dumps or contact us. Our data is meant to be share - throttling is use a matter of limited resources.

Clients¶

Python https://github.com/openlegaldata/oldp-sdk-python/
Javascript https://github.com/openlegaldata/oldp-sdk-js/
Java https://github.com/openlegaldata/oldp-sdk-java/
PHP https://github.com/openlegaldata/oldp-sdk-php/

Usage¶

Python¶

Python examples can be found in our OLDP-Notebooks on GitHub.

Curl¶

For terminal-loving developers, curl is also always an option. Examples can be found on ${SITE_URL}api/schema/.

# List cities
curl -X GET "${SITE_URL}api/cities/" -H  "accept: application/json" -H  "api_key: ${API_KEY}"

# Get cases from court with id=3
curl -X GET "${SITE_URL}api/cases/?court_id=3" -H  "accept: application/json" -H  "api_key: ${API_KEY}"

Data dumps and bulk downloads¶

To export all data that is exposed over the API at once, you can use the dump_api_data command.

./manage.py dump_api_data ./path/to/output_dir --override