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03.23.09 Reporting API For SiteCatalyst Released  By Gary Angel At last year's Omniture Summit - yes the 2008 version - one of the most interesting announcements was the release of a Reporting API for SiteCatalyst. Like red wine, technology announcements generally require a certain amount of time to age into a respectable level of maturity and the Omniture Reporting API was no exception. But late last year, after playing on-and-off with the API, we at Semphonic decided it had reached a level of maturity where it could be successfully used. It's early days - the API is still beta and its deployment model still a little fuzzy - but you can work with it reliably and produce interesting products. In my first blog on this topic, I provided an overview of what an API is and some basic information on the Omniture APIs. In the second and third posts, I took up the topic of the Token System (which controls how much you can use the API and how expensive it is). In today's post, I'm going to talk about the basic elements of an API application. I'm going to wrap up next week with some thoughts on when using the API is likely to be a good option for your business. Today's post is going to be moderately technical - but I'm going to try and keep the discussion appropriate for non-programmers. What I want to do is give you a feel for how the API works and what it can accomplish. First, it's important to realize that the Omniture API is really six or seven different APIs. The oldest, and in some ways least developed is the Data Insertion API. This API is really just a method of sending XML post requests to Omniture in lieu of firing a tag. It can be pretty handy in certain circumstances, but it's really not even appropriate to call it an API. The other APIs fall into three basic buckets: administration, job submittal, and reporting.
The administration API is quite full featured and allows you to both access and update pretty much any administrative setting that is available in SiteCatalyst. Why would this be useful? Well, if you are working with a large number of report suites, it can be time-consuming to check or set an attribute on many tens, hundreds or even thousands of report suites. If you need to do that, it's probably worth investing the effort into an application that will do it for you. The job submittal APIs are interfaces into the data warehouse and SAINT. They provide a mechanism for you to create and check on data warehouse requests or to create and submit SAINT requests. These job submittal APIs are very simple - often having only a few methods and relatively little potential for customization. The reporting APIs are the richest and most interesting. There is the base Reporting API (which is what I'm going to talk about today) and there is another, fairly similar, API for Discover. These APIs provide access to most of the same data you'd be able to access - respectively - with SiteCatalyst or Discover. Using the Reporting API typically involves six major steps: Continue reading this article.
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