Developer's Guide

What the Covata API can do

The Covata API allows your application to:

• Authenticate and authorise a Covata user to the Covata Platform.
• Work with files and folders (i.e. the fundamentals), by:
  • Obtaining a cryptographic key from the the Covata Platform's Access Service (required for encrypting or decrypting a file's/Secure Object's data).
  • Initializing a new 'Incomplete' file object within an organisation by associating the cryptographic key with this new file.
  • Completing a file object (uploading its locally-encrypted data), which involves your client application encrypting the file object's data first, then uploading this encrypted data to the Covata Platform's Content Service for storage.
  • Completing a file object (uploading its unencrypted data) to the Content Service for encryption, then storage.
  • Downloading a file object's data for local decryption if required.
  • Creating a folder to manage files and other folders.
  • Moving items to other folders.
• Retrieve a list of information about:
  • All immediate files and folders (i.e. items) of a common parent folder.
  • All items filtered by text search.
  • All items based on ownership or sharing status.
  • All ancestral folders of a specific file or folder.
• Allow other people (known as 'collaborators') to access an item, each with their own level of permissions on the item. This involves:
  • Sharing a file or a folder with other people.
  • Identifying existing collaborators on a file or folder.
  • Modifying (i.e. removing or adding) collaborators on a file or folder.

To perform the activities above, a Covata user account is required to be authenticated to the Covata Platform, which permits access to the Covata Platform's resources (i.e. through Covata API endpoints) that are available to this user.

Tools for accessing the Covata API

cURL

Example API calls used throughout this Developer's Guide are based on the standard command line tool cURL, which allows you to construct API requests at the command line to submit to the appropriate endpoints of either the Covata Platform's Access or Content Services.

Postman - REST Client

The Google Chrome tool Postman - REST Client, provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows you to construct and save a set of API endpoint requests to submit to the Covata Platform. Postman also allows you to upload data files to submit as part of a request (e.g. binary data as part of a multi-part form data element).

Developer's Guide contents

This Developer's Guide consists of the following sections:

• Authentication and authorisation
• Working with files and folders (fundamentals)
• Retrieving information about items
• Sharing items