Making a Basic Request

Let's go through the process of making a basic request, using the example of registering a merchant.

In the Evolve APIs, requests are made using REST over HTTP in the JSON format.

In the main, the responses you receive from the system are also formatted in JSON. Some requests do accept text/html responses, and these will be highlighted in the relevant section of the API reference. JSON requests can be expanded upon by providing one or more parameters, in the form of name-value pairs. Responses from the system also take the form of name-value pairs.

Some parameters are mandatory, these will be highlighted in the API reference.

In the Evolve APIs values can take the form of an alphanumeric string in, a number, boolean values such as true or false or null, or one of a predefined list of string values.

In the following example request you will only provide one parameter; however, requests can take many parameters.

The Evolve APIs use the following standard HTTP verbs to make requests, these correspond to create, read, update, and delete (or CRUD) operations, respectively:

• POST - Create

• GET - Read

• PUT - Update

• DELETE

Following this logic, a request to the Evolve Authentication API to view the details of the logged-in user would look like this:

Using your API Keys with the APIs

When making an API call to one of our endpoints the API key needs to be passed in the API_KEY header of the request being sent, an example is shown below:

POST {baseUrl}/merchants
  {
  "type": "SCHOOL",
  "isvId": "19000000"
  "organizationDetails":
  {
  "legalName": "Sample High School"
  }
  }  

So this request is providing the minimum required data necessary to create a merchant.

The response from this request would be:

POST {baseUrl}/merchants
  {
  "id": "11223344",
  "status": "NEW"
  "isvId": "19000000",
  "isvName": "SVCPROV",
  "mcc": "8211",
  "type": "SCHOOL",
  "createdAt": "2020-06-25T13:28:28.942Z",
  "createdBy": "10000000:test.user@email.com",
  "organizationDetails":
  {
  "legalName": "Sample High School"
  }
  }