Consumer Engagement

Welcome to the Consumer Engagement walkthrough. As you read through and try the example API requests, you will be introduced to the basics of using the EVRYTHNG Platform in an example tagged-products context. You'll learn about:

Projects and applications, which manage access to resources.
Products and Thngs, which are the core data storage resources in the Platform.
Actions, which can model data update events and notifications.
Visualizing the collected data with EVRYTHNG Dashboard widgets.

This API walkthrough is themed around a simple consumer engagement scenario using the EVRYTHNG Platform to implement and gain insights from a product packaging scanning campaign. This type of experience involves providing a dynamic experience to consumers who scan a QR code on the packaging of a product to get information, collect reward points, or some other incentive. You can read more about this type of use case in Real-time Web Product Scanning.

All the examples here use cURL, a standard Mac/Linux terminal program used to make web requests. You can paste the examples into your Mac or Linux terminal and immediately see the results. Sometimes, you must replace a placeholder with a real value you got from previous steps. These are called out as each case arises. In most cases, you must replace $OPERATOR_API_KEY in each example with your own Operator API Key.

Preparing an Account

To use the EVRYTHNG Platform:

Create a free account and get an Operator API Key. One of several types of API keys, the Operator API Key allows requests to be made on behalf of an account holder and has the highest privileges.
Create a Dashboard account in either the US region or EU region and log in. The EVRYTHNG Dashboard lets you visually interact with all the resources in your account and is useful for performing small-scale tasks. Besides managing resources, you can set up and use widget dashboards to gain insights into the data in your account. For this API walkthrough, you need only the Operator API Key.
Click your name in the top-right corner of the screen and choose Account Settings.
Click Show Key to display your Operator API Key. Make a note of this key before moving on to the next section.

Using the Examples

To make using these code examples as easy as possible, we recommend exporting your Operator API Key at the start of your terminal session. This saves you needing to insert it into every request. For example, in your user profile (such as .bash_profile or similar) or in the terminal itself:

export OPERATOR_API_KEY=1FGqgM8xr13gx...