04-09 Assignment 02: Meetup API.md

_{Pairing: Sacha (me) / Jerrad / Brian    Per: Thinkful's 'Reading API Documentation' Assignment}

Visit the meetup.com API docs...

1. Does this API require authentication?

Yes. Need to obtain member autorization an an access_token in an Authorization header prefixed with bearer.
e.g. curl -H "Authorization: Bearer {access_token}" https://api.meetup.com/members/self/
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doc: https://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/auth/#oauth2-resources

2. Does this API support CORS?

Yes.

3. Find the events search endpoint documentation. Describe in detail the response format of the events search endpoint. (HINT: You may need other keywords to find this endpoint.)

The question is a bit vague, because unless I'm mistaken there are different endpoints depending on what TYPE of event(s) you are searching for, no?

e.g.

If searching events by event topic:
GET https://api.meetup.com/find/topics
doc: https://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/find/topics/

If searching events by a target group:
GET https://api.meetup.com/:urlname/events
doc: https://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/:urlname/events/#list

etc.
Nonetheless, the reponse format of, say, GET https://api.meetup.com/find/topics returns an array of Topics:

• description: The description of the topic
• group_count: The number of groups using this topic
• id: Numeric topic id
• lang: Language topic originates from
• member_count: The number of members interested in this topic
• name: Display name of the topic
• urlkey: The unique keyword used to identify this topic

4. What are the limitations placed on the number of requests that can be made?

Indeed, although it doesn't explicitly say in the documention what the actual number of requests allowed is. Apparently, "You can know your current rate limit status by reading X-RateLimit HTTP headers included in responses... Clients that issue too many requests in a short period of time will receive a HTTP 429 error and an error message."
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doc: https://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/#limits

5. List the errors that you can expect when making calls to this API.

• 400 Bad request when there was a problem with the request
• 401 Unauthorized when you don't provide a valid token
• 429 Too Many Requests when you've gone over your request rate limit
• 500 Internal Server Error an unexpected error occured on our servers

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doc: https://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/#errors