Flow REST API introduction

The Flow REST API is a REST and JSON web service. Use the Flow API suite to extract raw data from Flow and specific metrics from reports. 

There are many ways to use the API. Here are some examples:

• Export Flow data to a reporting and analysis tool such as Microsoft Excel to perform custom reporting, data manipulation, and your own analysis.

• Integrate Flow data with another app to create custom dashboards. A SaaS service such as Domo (external site, opens in new tab) can help you create data-rich dashboards that enhance the Flow metrics that interest your team.

• Extend Flow functionality to create features beneficial to your team’s needs. An integration tool such as Zapier (external site, opens in new tab) can help you quickly integrate Flow data with just about any app your software team uses.

• Bulk import your teams into Flow using a CSV.

Using the interactive documentation

Flow provides Interactive API documentation (opens in new tab) for the Customer API for authenticated users. In this documentation, you can access Flow API endpoints, learn about the Flow API objects, and create requests from your repo.

Here are the basic steps for using the interactive documentation:

1. In the top navigation bar, click Settings.

2. In the left navigation under Integrations, click API keys.

3. You should now see the User API Keys panel. Click the link for the interactive documentation.

4. Select which endpoint you want to receive data from. For this example, let’s look at the Users endpoint. 

5. You will see two GET request URLs. Use the first one to obtain all author records. Use the second one to find results for a specific user ID. We will pretend to be unfamiliar with our users and not know a particular user ID. We’ll use the first operation. Select the first GET operation to expand its panel.

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6. Click Try it out to input data into the parameters.

7. In the real world, most engineering teams would have many users. To improve system performance, restrict your request to the specific data you need. We’ll filter our requests only to show three user records as an exercise. To do this, enter 3 in the limit field.

8. Now that you’ve set up your request, click Execute at the bottom of the panel to submit the request. The response panel displays information about the first three users in the response.