Please see the post or email from earlier today 
for information about the 10/17 release.

(This is a post of an email that was sent to the 
list of interested developers from the original 
API Conference call)
------------------------------------------

Hello Community Developers!

I know we said we weren’t going to communicate 
via email, but we wanted to provide a status 
update and some important details. We hope you 
have had time to look through the documentation we
 released last week, if not, you can still find it
 through our Apiary website (http://docs.
frceventsprelim.apiary.io/). As promised, we are 
ready to move to the next phase of our testing 
plan, which is still in the “preliminary” phase,
 but with a more realistic backend than the mock 
server that was available from Apiary. In this new
 phase, we have made data from a few 2014 events 
available through the API, and as you will see if 
you request the event listings, we have added an 
event code for the “River Rage” event that is 
happening here in New England next weekend. Our 
intention is to be syncing data to the API 
throughout the event, meaning that you will be 
able to make requests against the API and retrieve
 data about the “River Rage” event just like you
 would with a regional. There are a few caveats 
though, and we kindly ask that you please 
carefully read through them. They will help 
prevent headache for you, and for us:

•	This is not a production environment. It cannot
 stand up to constant hammering of requests. 
Please, be respectful of the system and other 
users since everyone will have the same token for 
now. With the exception of River Rage data, the 
other data won’t change, so there is no need to 
make numerous requests at a rapid speed. We know 
people will want to test parameters and scripts, 
and that is fine, but with the development server 
it is currently on, if the system gets overloaded 
and goes down, everyone loses out.
•	We have randomly entered some data from 2014 
events, so things may not be perfect. At this 
point, we are not looking to correct data, but 
rather to address any issues with the actual 
interface and access. What we mean is, for example
, if you think a particular match should have said
 red final score of 100 instead of red final score
 of 110, we kindly ask that you please disregard 
such differences. The data in this database is 
meant as a representation of a grouping of events 
in a real season, it may not be perfect.
•	At this time, none of the district 
functionality will work. In the event listings API
, you can use the optional `excludeDistrict` 
parameter, but others (like the `districtCode` 
parameter in event listings) will not work. We are
 aware of this, and it is something that will 
appear in a later edition and, of course, 
production versions. This also means the district 
listings API returns nothing.
•	The API requires authentication. Please see the
 section of the documentation about “
Authorization Center” for the details about how 
to make calls without receiving the “401 
Unauthorized” response.
•	Please read through the examples and 
documentation before reporting Trackers, many 
common questions are addressed there and can save 
the time of typing out a detailed tracker report. 
On that same note though, if you do discover 
anything that doesn’t seem to function correctly 
or seems out of place, please do open a tracker on
 the TeamForge site. That way, one of the support 
folks can reply to you and update the bug report 
as needed.

You can use the season data API to retrieve the 
event listings for 2014, and that will work, but 
please be aware that only the following events 
will have data loaded for the other APIs (rankings
, results, etc):

Boilermaker Regional – INWL
Greater Kansas City Regional – MOKC
Minnesota 10000 Lakes Regional – MNMI
Lake Superior Regional – MNDU
Central Illinois Regional – ILIL
River Rage Off Season – RIVER (event happens 10/
25 in NH)

At this time we aren't supporting unique API 
tokens. Instead, we have one token to share. That 
token needs to be implemented as described in the 
documentation, so please read through it. Notice 
that the examples Apiary shows do not account for 
the authorization, so you will need to adjust your
 code accordingly. The shared key is:

(removed from web post)

You can access the API at the following URL. 
Please note that because of the authorization 
requirement on the API, viewing the page in a 
browser won’t work (since you don’t supply the 
token). You will need to use code from the 
language of your choice, or a web debugging tool 
like Fiddler to try out this next edition.

(removed from web post)

We hope that this next step will prove useful to 
you in your development. Please provide us with 
feedback, positive or negative, through TeamForge 
so that we know how people’s test efforts are 
working out. Remember to use trackers for things 
you believe to be “bugs” or “suggested 
improvements” (there are locations for each) and 
use discussions for more general, community 
discussions about the tools and API. While you are
 on TeamForge, please enable your notifications. 
You can do this by (once you are logged in) going 
to “My Workspace” >> “Monitoring” >> “FIRST 
Community Developers” >> “Monitored Applications
” and checking the boxes there. That way, as we 
post and update things, you are able to receive 
updates about them.

Thank you for your efforts to better our community
 tools, and we look forward to the coming days and
 weeks of development.


--------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------
Alex Herreid and Chuck Harris
FIRST Robotics Competition


-----------------------------------
If you were not on the email list for this message
 but are interested in participating in this phase
 please email aherreid@usfirst.org with your name,
 team and desired use and we can get you the 
pieces that were removed from this web version. 
Thank you.