When DNN's engineering team was faced with the challenge of creating tutorials and applications using Evoq LiquidContent's REST API (with documentation), they thought: why not create an application that can act as documentation itself? That may be the best way to help other developers use the API. Developers could then start interacting with the API immediately, or use the tool to debug more advanced API calls.
When you, as a developer, want to start using the LiquidContent API, you may begin by reading the documentation, find out what URLs you should call, and how to form your requests with their required contract, etc.Then you can start issuing sample requests, and inspecting the responses to check if you are using the API the way you want. Some use common http debug tools, like curl or postman, others write sample code in your their favorite language.
The goal of our API Explorer application is to ease this process of beginning with the API by providing a tool to interact and play with the API calls as quickly as possible. The usage of this tool can be viewed as documentation of the API itself.
You can start issuing your first request with a single click. Then inspect how the request was made and what the received response was: is the response valid or did I receive an error? For different operations you can change the parameters of the request, or for requests where a payload should be provided, a syntax-specific JSON editor is used to form this payload. If you aren't sure how the parameters or payload should be formed, a set of common examples are included to auto-fill the request inputs. The tool even generates small code snippets of the selected request that can be copied and pasted into your app.
Full disclosure, this tool is inspired by similar ones from Facebook and Twitter.