API Basics
The Box API gives you access to the content management features you see in our web app and lets you extend them for use in your own app. It strives to be RESTful and is organized around the main resources you’re familiar with from the Box web interface.
Before you do anything, you should create a free Box account that you can test the API against and register for an API key so that you can make API calls.
Example Requests
Sample API calls are provided next to each method using cURL, a standard command line tool. All you need to do is drop in your specific parameters, and you can test the calls from the command line. Here is a great tutorial on using cURL with APIs. If the command line isn’t your preference, a great alternative is POSTMAN, an easy-to-use Chrome extension for making HTTP requests.
Input/Output Format
Both request body data and response data are formatted as JSON. Extremely large numbers will be returned in IEEE754 format (the same way doubles are stored in Java), e.g. 1.2318237429383e+31
Date Format
All timestamps (both those sent in requests and those returned in responses) should be formatted as shown in our examples. We support a narrow subset of ISO 8601. The preferred way to pass in a date is by converting the time to UTC such as this: “2013-04-17T09:12:36-00:00″
gzip
If you would like responses from Box to be compressed for faster response times, simply include an Accept-Encoding header with a value of gzip, deflate, and responses will be gzipped.
CORS
CORS, or cross-origin resource sharing, is a mechanism that allows a web page to make XMLHttpRequests to another domain (i.e. a domain different from the one it was loaded from). CORS is supported in a specific set of modern browsers. The Box API supports CORS on an app-by-app basis. If you’re building an application that needs CORS, please contact us with a description of your use case.
Upcoming Changes
We are always maintaining, fixing, and enhancing our API. As such, you should expect new endpoints to show up, new fields to be added to responses and new error codes to appear. We recommend that you build your code to gracefully ignore things that you aren’t expecting, and to handle errors in standard HTTP-centric ways.
Getting Help
Please utilize the box-api tag on StackOverflow for any questions or suggestions. For more info on v1 of the Box API, please see here