At Highnote, our product is built with GraphQL. GraphQL APIs allow tailored, user-centric access to our platform and offer flexibility to build great brand experiences. One of the major benefits of GraphQL is the ability to explore the graph. The ability to search and discover new objects is important to building your application quickly, but learning a new type of API can be overwhelming when you’ve got a new payments feature to build. That’s why we’re here to guide you through this learning process.
We’ve just released an upgraded version of our API Explorer to help you get started quickly and explore at the same time! Let’s take a look at some of the features.
Our API Explorer automatically embeds an API key, provides crafted queries and mutations, and allows you to run those queries directly in your test environment. This means that you don’t have to download a different program and set up a separate environment to get started. We care about enabling you and your teams to dive right into building your application, and the API Explorer allows you to start building and testing right from the time you login.
We have docs that provide an overview of concepts across our platform and in-line code snippets that you can run in your Test Environment, without even having to leave the docs page! If you’re looking to jump right in and identify the mutation or query you need to build your feature, we have introduced pre-built Collections organized by concepts and jobs-to-be-done. These Collections allow you to start with a base query to test out the inputs and responses.
When building a feature developers live in the docs and the beauty of GraphQL is that it’s self-documenting. The descriptions of any element in the graph are called docstrings.
In our Explorer, you can view the docstrings in context just like you can in many of the tools for GraphQL. This way you don’t have to toggle back and forth between a documentation site and the place you’re building your mutation or query.
Mistakes in code are a pain - especially when you find out AFTER you push the run button. Most GraphQL tools provide auto-suggest, to help you build quickly and accurately. We made sure this feature was a part of our Explorer.
This feature also helps you discover fields that may not be a part of the example query, so you build exactly what you need in the response for your application.
We ❤️ GraphQL because we believe it unleashes a world of innovation for your products and business to succeed. Check out our docs and give the updated API Explorer a spin!