Accessing Data in Clever's API and API Change Policy

Introduction

In this guide, we'll discuss how to access data in the Clever API and explain our API change policy. For details on our schema, error handling examples, and to test API calls, check out our reference docs.

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Access Tokens

There are two methods of accessing our API – district-app tokens and SSO bearer tokens.

District-App Tokens

Every time a district authorizes your application, a token is created that stores the details of this authorization. A token is a string of characters, such as 7f76343d50b9e956138169e8cbb4630bb887b18.

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If you aren't a Secure Sync customer, district-app bearer tokens can only access /districts/ and its related endpoints. Access to other endpoints is only available with SSO bearer tokens.
Section data and Events can only be accessed with district-app bearer tokens belonging to Secure Sync customers.

See our article on onboarding districts for information on obtaining district-app bearer tokens.

SSO Bearer Tokens

SSO bearer tokens relate to individual students, teachers, district admins, and school admins. The data available to these tokens are generally scoped to data "around" the owner of the token. For example, a student token can retrieve information about the student represented by the token, a teacher token can retrieve information about the teacher represented by the token, etc. SSO tokens are strings with an il prefix, such as il3jsfUI2131da2f.

SSO tokens may only access:

/me
/users/<user id>
/schools/<school id>
/districts/<district id>

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Please note that some fields referenced in the schema for these objects are inaccessible via these tokens.

API Change Policy

Clever is committed to providing the best experience for developers building on our platform. To make it easier and faster to build on Clever, we constantly improve by adding new features and deprecating ones that might get in the way. Here's what to expect from Clever when we make changes to our API.

Switching to a New API Version

You can make calls against new versions of the API by updating your URLs (e.g., https://api.clever.com/v3.0/district). For detailed information on upgrading to this version, check out Migrating to API v3.0.

Releasing New Versions

We’re committed to releasing major versions (e.g., v2.0) no more than once per year. Minor versions (e.g., v1.2) will be released as needed.

We define a minor release as one that will only add new features (e.g., response fields, input parameters, endpoints, etc.) and fix small bugs while remaining backwards compatible. Major version releases may also contain features that are not backwards compatible and feature deprecations.

When a new version is officially released, new applications will not be able to use any previous version of our API.

Updating Versions After Release

While we consider new versions code-complete upon official release, we recognize that bugs can slip by our testing processes. For three months after a version is released, we will make updates to fix any existing bugs. Once three months have passed, we will freeze the version as-is and make no further updates.

Global Changes

We sometimes need to make changes to all API versions. If we do, we will use the v1.1 API Change Policy.

Deprecating Existing Versions

We mark versions of our API as deprecated in our documentation when new customers can no longer use the version (which happens when we release a new version). However, we will continue to support versions marked as deprecated.

We’re still thinking about what sunsetting support for an API would look like in the future.