Overview
The Entrata API provides programmatic access to read and write data to the Entrata Platform as a Service (PaaS), and it retrieves various property and marketing data, lease and resident details, and more.
The API is organized around RPC protocols, and authenticates users by a username and password generated through the Entrata platform. Each user is a specific client and they can only access API for that particular company.
In order to make the API as explorable as possible, Entrata provides a “swagger-like” experience in their documentation where you are able to view all the endpoints, methods, parameters, examples, and even test out the API’s functionality for all read types of web-services. This functionality returns live data.
The API supports both XML and JSON format.
For our use-case we will only be dealing with JSON. The response will
match the request format and should be specified in the
Content-Type HTTP header. The URL
endpoint depends upon the call being made. For example, if
you are making the getCustomers service, you would post to
https://[subdomain].entrata.com/api/customers. The
subdomain is client specific.
Please note that unless stated otherwise, all dates and times used in the API are assumed to be in Mountain Time (MST or MDT).
Authentication
The Entrata API uses basic authentication. The username and password
are passed in the Authorization header of the
HTTP request. The username and password are the same as the
ones used to log into the Entrata platform.
To perform authentication from R, this package utilizes the
httr2 library’s req_auth_basic() function to
pass the username and password to the API and handle the encoding of the
credentials.
Endpoints and Methods
The Entrata API has a number of endpoints that can be accessed. Each
endpoint has a number of methods that can be called. The methods are
specific to the endpoint and are used to perform specific actions on the
data. For example, the properties endpoint has methods like
getProperties, getPropertyUnits, and
sendFloorplans.
It is important to note that all requests made to the Entrata API
are HTTP POST requests. This means that
all requests must be made using the POST method, even if
the operation is a read-only (i.e. GET) operation. This is
where the endpoint-specific methods (not to be confused with
HTTP methods) come into play. The method is the action that
you want to perform on the data. For example, if you want to get a list
of properties, you would use the getProperties method on
the properties endpoint passing it the necessary parameters
specific to that method.
Status Codes
Another unique aspect of the Entrata API is that it always returns a
200 status code, regardless of the success or failure of
the request. To determine if a request was successful or not, you must
inspect the response body. If the response body contains an error
message and code, then the request was not successful.
The actual HTTP status code associated with the error
will be located in the response body instead of the typical
HTTP status code. The response body will contain a
status object with a code and
message field. The code field will contain the
HTTP status code and the message field will
contain the message.