Make your first request

This guide will walk you through some steps that you could follow to make your first request. This is a great resource to help you after first acquiring access to your developer account. 

If you are interested in using code samples, more technical guides, or a graphical tool like Postman, please consider using the following guides to make your first request. 

Step 1. Identify which endpoint you would like to use

The Regulatory Intelligence API allows you to perform a variety of different actions that you might be able to perform on the Regulatory Intelligence website. 

We have a complete list of endpoints that are available via the API listed within our API Reference Index, but we recommend sticking to one of the following for simplicity’s sake. 

• Perform a search
• Retrieve document metadata
• Retrieve document text

Step 2: Choose a tool to make your request

While some requests can be straightforward, others can be tricky to build. That’s why it can be useful to make use of some of the well-established and renowned tools to remove some of the complexity. 

The following are some recommended tools and details on how to use them. 

Postman

Postman is a visual tool that you can use to make requests to REST endpoints. We’ve created some great materials around Postman to help you get started with and explore the different endpoints available via the Regulatory Intelligence API.

We recommend you read through our “Getting started with Postman” tutorial to learn how to add your keys and tokens and make your first request. 

If you prefer a more simple graphical tool, you should also consider using Insomnia. 

Step 3: Review the response

Once you’ve made a successful request, you will receive a payload with metadata related to the request. 

For any endpoints utilized, you will receive metadata related to the resource (text, metadata, etc) that you made the request to in JSON format. Review the different fields that returned and see if you can map the information that you requested to the content on Regulatory Intelligence.