title: Web API Legacy - Token & Basic Auth

Web API

Time cockpit offers a web-based API. HTTP, REST and JSON can be used to access and modify information without depending on our .NET SDK. This service is publicly hosted and customers do not have to perform any additional installation or configuration steps.

Service Endpoint

The address of our web API is https://api.timecockpit.com. It is only accessible via HTTPS and with valid authentication.

Authentication

Three forms of authentication are currently supported:

  • Token authentication offers a simple and efficient way to authenticate web requests. A header is used to transfer the access token and identify the bearer.
  • Basic authentication with username and password is used by tools that do not offer token authentication (e.g. OData in Excel) and to initially acquire authentication tokens.
Warning

We strongly discourage to use token or basic authentication. These methods of authentication will be disabled in the forseeable future. We strongly recommend to autenticate using PATs.

The following sample shows how to acquire a token via a simple web request and issue an exemplary service request with token authentication:

var tokenUri = "https://api.timecockpit.com/token";
var metadataUri = "https://api.timecockpit.com/odata/$metadata";

using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
  // set basic credentials and acquire token
  client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("demo@timecockpit.com", "...");
  var token = client.DownloadString(tokenUri);

  // remove basic credentials and add token to headers
  client.Credentials = null;
  client.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Bearer " + token);

  // example service usage: retrieve and parser metadata 
  var metadata = XDocument.Parse(client.DownloadString(metadataUri));
}

The relevant web requests issued by this example are:

Token Request

GET https://api.timecockpit.com/token HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Basic bmljZTp0cnkgOik=
Host: api.timecockpit.com

Metadata Request

GET https://api.timecockpit.com/odata/$metadata HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9...
Host: api.timecockpit.com

Metadata Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 53769
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
DataServiceVersion: 3.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Set-Cookie: ARRAffinity=244116e25a72155d832c22601a40ae87af7d9c2cb18a99a181efeffc297cbc64;Path=/;Domain=api.timecockpit.com
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 11:08:26 GMT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<edmx:Edmx Version="1.0" xmlns:edmx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/06/edmx">
<edmx:DataServices m:DataServiceVersion="3.0" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata">
<Schema Namespace="cofx" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2009/11/edm">
<EntityType Name="APP_CalendarWeekRule">
<Key>
<PropertyRef Name="APP_CalendarWeekRuleUuid" />
</Key>
<Property Name="APP_CalendarWeekRuleUuid" Type="Edm.Guid" Nullable="false" />
<Property Name="APP_CalendarWeekRuleCode" Type="Edm.String" />
<Property Name="APP_CalendarWeekRuleName" Type="Edm.String" />
<!-- .... -->

Current Limitations

The API is only tested with recent time cockpit versions. If your account has never been used with a time cockpit version >= 1.10 (March 2013) a recent full client has to be used to update.