Launch of New Developer Portal & FAQ

Good afternoon everyone,

I hope everyone is keeping safe and well.

I’m very happy to announce that we have now launched our new developer portal on https://api-portal.tfl.gov.uk

I’ve drafted some FAQs for how to access the portal:

What have we been doing?

After migrating our API management platform in July, we have been creating a new developer portal to allow you to manage your API keys and account. This will also allow us to more easily add further API endpoints to the suite in an easier fashion. (Keep an eye on the forum for announcements in the near future)

What will happen with my API credentials?

Your existing API keys (api_key) have been migrated to the new solution, but the App_Id has not. You will no longer need to pass the app_id to the API to use the APIs. Don’t worry if you are still passing it, we will ignore that part of your string so you don’t have to re-code your applications straight away.

How will I sign into the new developer portal?

Your account details (email & name) have been migrated to the new portal but we have not migrated your passwords. On first use of the portal, you’ll need to choose the “Forgot your Password” option under the “Sign In” page. This includes those people who have requested API credentials in the recent interim period.

There will be further FAQs within the portal itself on how to use the API.

If you have any questions on this, please feel free to shout.
Thanks,
James

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The documentation for the API is much better now! We get a description of what each field of a payload actually means.

Keep up the good work, guys! Are there any new features planned for later?

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Hello. I signed up for the API yesterday, and have to say… I am a little confused.

I selected the “500 Requests per min” product. It has put a ‘Primary’ and ‘Secondary’ key in my ‘Profile’ and says the state of my submission is ‘submitted’.

The thing is… there doesn’t seem to be any information on how to authenticate my requests. I read above that there is no longer the use of the app_id (I never had one of these) and I am not sure what the api_key is, is that the primarykey or the secondary key? Do I pass these as part of a query parameter called api_key?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

hi @Aopen

Thanks for your query. You’ve highlighted a small issue which we have corrected that didn’t auto-approve your subscription. We have manually approved it for you and fixed the approval process too.

You will only need to pass one key in your parameters, i.e. ?app_key={app_key}. The secondary key can be used too but it will count towards the same quota. I think that it can come in useful if you are coding multiple systems to use the same subscription.

I hope that solves your issue, but please let us know if there’s any further problems.

Thanks,
James

hi @nathanodong

Yes, we are working on a few enhancements and we’ll communicate this out when we’re near to releasing them.

One of the main reasons in doing this was to give ourselves the ability to add more API endpoints to our Open Data platform in a more efficient fashion. Over the next few weeks and months there will be more on this although I can’t comment specifically until the official announcements have been made. However - watch this space!

Thanks,
James

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New portal has a CAPTCHA which uses letters and numerals in different fonts so I’ve no idea is this is FIVE, lower case S, or upper case S. Twice in the first row.

GetHIPData

It took me four goes to prove my humanity!

@jamesevans

Right, I thought I would give it go and it does seem a lot better a system than the one you had before.

It’s very handy that you can download the technical descriptions into various formats. This means you can import them directly into a tool like Insomnia, which is great as it’s never that good doing this sort of thing in a browser. Download - Insomnia

So, this is actually quite a good step forward and will reduce the amount of time working out what data you can get from the APIs.

Great work, thanks.

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Thanks @briantist

I’m glad you’re enjoying the new portal.

In terms of the captcha, it needs to be entered as one continuous string which is not case sensitive. That should only appear if you are resetting a password or signing up for a new account. I think if you get ambiguous characters, you can use the “New” button to generate another or use the “Audio” button to get a sound-version.

The captcha isn’t a massive issue as you say. I just thought it odd that they might like to avoid the 1 l L and O o 0 problem. I guess I did when I wrote one…

Thanks for launching the new developer portal. I just registered for a new account. It isn’t clear where I would go to create or access an app_key?

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Hi @mathewtrivett

Welcome - you should be able to go to Product and subscribe to the 500 requests per min product. Once you have done that, your keys will show in the Profile page.

Please let me know if there’s any further issues.

thanks,
James

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Hi James,

Thanks for this, I’m not sure if I was just distracted but I seemed to miss this.

Very best

Mathew