What you will learn
Section titled “What you will learn”Find and evaluate the contract before writing a client.
Prerequisites: IFS Cloud essentials. No IFS login is needed for this written exercise. Estimated reading time excludes practice.
The concept
Section titled “The concept”API Explorer exposes information about APIs available in the solution. Its documentation describes API class, layer, deprecation information, and specification views. Availability depends on active modules. A page name or a guessed URL is not an API contract.
A worked scenario
Section titled “A worked scenario”An external handover tool needs record identifiers and references. Before writing a connector, identify an appropriate API and establish which properties and operations it actually exposes.
Work through it
Section titled “Work through it”- Define the business operation and the minimum data needed.
- Use the authorized environment’s API Explorer and relevant documentation to identify a candidate.
- Inspect its specification, property types, supported operations, and API policy.
- Record authentication, authorization, limits, ownership, and expected error behavior.
Try it yourself
Section titled “Try it yourself”Write a contract checklist for a read-only handover lookup without inventing an IFS endpoint.
See a suggested answer
Record the selected projection and entity set after discovery, the key fields, selected properties, filters, pagination behavior, required access, and API owner. Leave unknown values explicitly unresolved. Use the environment’s generated specification to replace them before implementation.
Check your understanding
Section titled “Check your understanding”Treating an example projection name as a guaranteed API in every environment.
Expected result: a written answer that explains your decision and identifies what still needs confirmation in the actual environment.
Cleanup: none; this exercise changes no IFS data.
Sources and review status
Section titled “Sources and review status”IFS Cloud 26R1 documentation. Source consulted 2026-09-23. The scenario and exercise are original fictional examples. This concept draft has not been reviewed by an IFS specialist or executed in an IFS environment.
Apply this lesson in the handover-reference project.