Nowadays having REST API has become a standard capability that customers and prospects are expecting or asking. This is because it is easy to use in different applications, especially custom web applications. We developed a RESTful API built on top of the OpenAPI specification allowing customers to generate a client library of the programming language they prefer. This makes it easier to communicate with Tridion Docs so they can focus on developing their application. This post explains it and the video shows how to use it. 

When developing a replacement for the legacy Web Client, which we called Organize Space, the decision was made to use React for building the User Interface. The React application needs to talk to the backend and using our existing SOAP Web Service is not the best choice. Over time we received feedback from customers that this SOAP Web Service is not easy to use outside of the Microsoft world despite the fact it is based on open standards. Also using active WS-Trust and passive WS-Federation security protocols for authentication did not make it easier. 

These days frontend applications love the JSON format for sending and retrieving information to and from the backend. Together with adding Modern Authentication (OpenID Connect) to our system and making it possible to generate client libraries for your choice we made a new RESTful API based on the OpenAPI standard. 

With last year's Tridion Docs 15.0 we released the new UI called Organize Space which uses the new RESTful API and Modern Authentication, but we kept the RESTful API private to get validation and confidence that it is working fine in production. 

When reading the title of the blog post you are wondering if I can use the RESTful API now in Tridion Docs 15.1 and the answer is, YES. There are 2 editions, v3 you can use, and v0 (internal) is there to support Organize Space. Both versions are quality well-tested APIs, only for v3 we guarantee cross-release compatibility while v0 can change whenever we need it – although probably not that often. 

The RESTful v3 API is not on feature parity yet compared to the SOAP v2.5 Web Service but when you start developing a new application use our RESTful API and for functionality that is not there yet, you can use the SOAP Web Service. The RESTful API will be feature complete in the next major version of Tridion Docs. Before this happens, we will give lots of information, training, etc. in advance. 

The RESTful API only uses Modern Authentication and to make it possible to use one type of authentication in your application we added Modern Authentication to our SOAP Web Service. The SOAP Web Service with legacy authentication remains available. The whole application, including Client Tools up to ISHRemote, is protected by the OpenID Connect security protocol. 

Tridion Docs Content Manager public Web Services API overview 

If you are wondering how to start developing a secure web application using our new RESTful API watch the video.