API Updates: Project Staff, Custom Emails and payment.delete

by Paul in API Additions, Development on October 23, 2009

On Wednesday we released some pretty exciting updates to our API and wanted to make sure you were aware of them.

Project Results

If you are an administrator or a staff member who is assigned as a project manager to a project, project.get and project.list methods now return the ids of users who are assigned to that project. Up until now it was impossible to determine if a user was assigned to a project when listing them. Because of this, our OS X time tracker for instance would list all projects that a user could see, not just the ones that they were assigned to. If the user clicked on "Submit" after selecting a project that they weren't assigned to, they would get an error because you can't track time to a project you aren't assigned to. What a headache! See the updated documentation for details.

Custom Emails

You can now send custom email messages with invoice.sendByEmail and estimate.sendByEmail. Just include both a subject and a message element in your request. You can use any of the variables that are available when customizing messages within FreshBooks (i.e. ::invoice link::, ::payment amount::, ::estimate link::). See examples on the invoice and estimate documentation pages.

Delete Payments

We've added a payment.delete method. This will allow you to permanently delete payments. If the payment being deleted was made against an invoice, the status of the invoice will be updated. Check out the documentation.

So there you go, three great new features!

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Staff API Access: No More Restrictions!

by Paul in API Additions, Integrations, Development on September 30, 2009

As of today, the FreshBooks API is fully functional for Staff members, not just Administrators. Ever since its debut, the API has used a more restrictive set of permissions than the application. This made things a little simpler for us, but it didn't help our users or third-party add-on developers. It meant that certain third-party applications simply weren't as useful for customers who had multiple staff members sharing a single FreshBooks account. We've received many requests from developers to open up permissions in the API so that they more closely follow the permission settings in the application. You have been heard!

Staff now have access to all of the API methods as long as they are given the appropriate permissions from the application settings. This means that if the invoices tab is enabled for staff in the application, they can view and edit invoices from the API for clients who they are assigned to. Likewise, if the estimates tab is enabled, they will have API access to estimates for clients who they are assigned to. Ditto for Recurring Profiles, Payments and Items.

We hope that this change will make existing applications more useful and encourage new kinds of third-party add-ons that were simply not possible before. Having the API be more consistent with the application should help make FreshBooks more useful for everybody.

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FreshBooks now supports OAuth

by Sunir in Integrations, Development on September 10, 2009

FreshBooks now supports OAuth to make it easier to build and manage its third-party addons.

Today, we're proud to announce that we now support OAuth, an increasingly popular open protocol for secure API authorization. OAuth is used by many cool services such as Google Docs, Netflix, and Twitter, and we're glad to join the club!

Over the past year, FreshBooks has grown a large collection of third-party add-ons. Supporting OAuth will make it easier for customers to manage third party add-ons' access to their FreshBooks data. Add-ons that support OAuth will no longer require customers to search for and then copy and paste their FreshBooks authentication token, which will be a huge relief to customers and third party integrations alike.

More importantly, instead of sharing one authentication token with all third-party add-ons, OAuth creates a separate relationship for each add-on uniquely, all behind the scenes. That means customers will be able to turn on and off access to each separate add-on without affecting any others. This gives customers important control over who has access to their data, and when.

We strongly recommend all third-party add-ons use OAuth for secure authorization since we may eventually require it for all future add-ons.

For more information about OAuth you can read the official OAuth documentation available at the OAuth.net site as well as the FreshBooks OAuth documentation. Also, stay tuned to the Developer Blog for all future updates about OAuth and the FreshBooks API.

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