Generally, you have to authenticate yourself to access our services. This is done using an unique API key which is bound to:

  • the supplier (Rasch Wallpapers, Rasch Textil, etc…)
  • your customer id
  • the access permissions that are granted to your account.

For security reasons, we’ll restrict the API access to the minimal level that our business partners requires for their needs, and only extend it on demand.

To apply for an API key or to extend your access permissions please contact our sales department.

Authenticate with HTTP header fields

The preferred method to pass the API key to the RDS service is to use the HTTP header fields X-RDS-Key and Authorization, as the key will not appear in proxy log files.

If your client allows to directly define header fields, just add an header field called Authorization: followed by your API key. Otherwise, you can use HTTP Basic Authentication and supply the key either as username (with random password) or as password (with empty username). Since our API doesn’t explictly request authentication you have to disable authentication challenge, if required (wget: use --auth-no-challenge).

Examples

# Use curl with header field
curl -s -o- -H 'X-RDS-Key: YOURAPIKEY' 'https://rds.rasch.de/v2/messages'

# Use curl with API key as password
curl -s -o- --user ':YOURAPIKEY' 'https://rds.rasch.de/v2/messages'

Authenticate with request parameter

If you cannot define HTTP header fields or username/password you can also supply the key as request parameter key=.

Example

# Use curl with key parameter
curl -s -o- 'https://rds.rasch.de/v2/messages?key=YOURAPIKEY'

Branch Office Authentication

If you are a head office you can authenticate yourself as one of your branches by appending the branches customer number behind the API key, separeted by an ‘@’-sign.

Example

# Use curl with key parameter for branch office "9999002"
curl -s -o- 'https://rds.rasch.de/v2/messages?key=YOURAPIKEY@9999002'

# Use curl with header field for branch office "9999002"
curl -s -o- -H 'X-RDS-Key: YOURAPIKEY@9999002' 'https://rds.rasch.de/v2/messages'

# Use curl with API key as password for branch office "9999002"
curl -s -o- --user ':YOURAPIKEY@9999002' 'https://rds.rasch.de/v2/messages'