Does anyone have advice on a great beginner API course?

Hi @barriebramley and welcome to the community! This is an interesting idea. We don’t have a course for using the API, but what are you looking to do with it? That might help us know what articles/videos to share with you!

@mathio and @picsoung will also be your go-to’s for information as well!

Hi @Liz 

Thank you for your reply. As I’ve used Typeform more and more, I am learning there are so many more features, and things that can be done. Many of them are achievable through the use of the API. So I now want to learn, because I’m frustrated not understanding any of what I read.

I’d like to learn to do two things, right off….

• Authenticate users (make sure they’re on a pre-determined list) before they start
• Automatically update a Typeform from a Google Sheet

Thank you for any assistance or things you are able to send

BB

Hi @barriebramley Got it - thank you! @mathio do you happen to have any advice for these? 

HI @barriebramley and @Liz ,

I feel like those topics fall more into a general programming and are not necessarily connected to Typeform and its kind of a broader topic. In short:

Authenticate users 

Typeform does not support “login” for respondents. You would need to build a login outside of Typeform and embed it in a page accessible to authenticated users only. Simplest approach could be having a eg. a Wordpress site where you would restrict access to logged-in users only. Unfortunately anyone who knows the form direct URL would be able to access it, since all published typeforms are public. 

You could take this one step further and filter out responses of non-authenticated users by passing their identifier (eg. email address) to your embedded typeform. To do this, you can use Responses API.

Automatically update a Typeform

For this you would need to build your own script to read your Google Sheet and use Typeform Create API to modify your form. However I dont think I would advocate for this, since you would need a developer to maintain this script to make sure it supports all typeform features.

Hey @barriebramley 

Careful with APIs... when you get started... you are hooked for life 

I think you can check Postman and their learning center they have a few step by step tutorials about using APIs https://learning.postman.com/

Or this video from freecodecamp https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/apis-for-beginners-full-course/

@mathio pointed you in the right direction regarding the stuff you want to build
i’ve built few years ago an example to showcase updating dropdown values: https://medium.com/typeforms-engineering-blog/make-typeform-fields-dynamic-using-serverless-11f61a08003