Introduction

McLeod's APIs provide programmatic access to LoadMaster™/PowerBroker™ logic and data. Callers of this API can manage master files, create and edit orders, dispatch trucks and more. The API enforces authentication, auditing, permissions and validation just like the desktop software does, so calls to this service are safe and predictable.

Although programmers have always been free to run SQL statements against the underlying database, performing operations that change data introduce risk of unexpected application behavior or database corruption. This API provides a mechanism that enables programmers to make changes to the McLeod data in a safe way.

Overview

This API supports a Representational State Transfer (REST) model for accessing a set of resources through a fixed set of operations. Typically data is returned in XML or JSON format, unless noted otherwise in this documentation. Set the Accept HTTP header to specify which format you want. Use application/xml for XML and application/json for JSON. XML is our default if this header is unset.

Our XML follows a convention of matching the underlying database where the element name is the same as the database table name and all fields in that table are attributes on the element. This makes parsing simple since SAX parsers provide all attributes for the element in a Map-like structure in the startElement callback.

Our JSON follows a similar convention. The name of the table is the value having the __type name in the JSON object. All other name/value pairs not prefixed with __ are from the corresponding database table.