# Calling the API

Available in...

* Cloud API Services Platform
* Cloud Big Data
* Cloud Big Data Platform
* Cloud Data Fabric
* Cloud Data Integration
* Cloud Data Management Platform
* Cloud Pipeline Designer Standard Edition
* Data Fabric

Once your API is enabled, you can call it using the OData syntax.

## General syntax

To call your API, you need:

* The API's URL. It is made up of a base URL and the API path generated when enabling the API. If you are using a Cloud Engine for Design, this URL is displayed in the API tab of your dataset. If you are using a Remote Engine Gen2, only the API path is displayed. Contact your administrator to get the base URL.
* To insert /apis/ between the base URL and the API path. An URL template for an API call would be for example <base\_url>/apis/<api\_path>.
* The credentials defined when creating the consumer you want to use.

When calling an API on a Cloud Engine for Design, you need to take into account the following limitations:

* The call rate is limited to 30 requests per second and per incoming client IP.
* Machines in the same VPN network will count as one client IP because they share the same public IP.

Information noteWarning: A temporary issue causes columns using certain semantic type in the source dataset to be converted to string when called via the API:

* boolean values
* dates, including dates and times
* integer and decimal value, for Oracle
* Long integer values, namely SQL bigint

## Testing on a personal environment

Let's take the example of a dataset holding basic customer information, created using a connection hosted on a Remote Engine Gen2 installed on your personal machine. After you enable an API for the entity set named customers and the API path customers-api-2PZPTB, you can call it with the tool of your choice using the following URL:

```
http://localhost:8080/apis/customers-api-2PZPTB/customers
```

Because the API is hosted on your personal machine, the base URL of your API will simply be http://localhost:8080. This request will return the information of the whole dataset.

## Example of API call on prod

When calling the same API, but this time in a production context, some parameters will change, to result in the following URL:

```
https://mycompany.com/apis/customers-api-2PZPTB/customers
```

* The API should be secured with HTTPS. See [Securing the API](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/data-inventory-user-guide/Cloud/securing-api) for information on how to configure HTTPS.
* The base URL has been set up by your administrator to reflect your company domain, or any other custom format.

The rest of the URL, namely the /apis/ part and the API path stay identical.

For more examples of calls using the supported OData expressivity, see [API expressivity](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/data-inventory-user-guide/Cloud/api-expressivity).