Data Format

Values, object tags and enveloped responses

This section contains information about the common format and structure of the data as it pertains to both individual fields and whole responses.

Date and Time

Timestamps

Timestamps on Atlas follow the RFC 3339 format and are always interpreted as UTC time, unless otherwise noted in the resource's documentation.

Timestamps may resolve with second, millisecond or microsecond precision. We don't store or provide nanosecond level granularity in timestamps.

Dates

For fields that express solely a date, the simpler YYYY-MM-DD format.

For example, the billing_date field of Retrieve a Billing Report example JSON is:

2018-09-30

Object types

Every object returned by the API has an object field to advertise its type. These types are dotted values and correspond to the overall organization of the API.

For example, /reporting is a section of the API containing PDF reports and settings. Benchmarks are objects that are retrievable from this section and have the object type reporting.benchmark, since the data is available at /reporting/benchmark

Throughout the API Reference documentation you'll find the value of the object key for each data type.

Envelope

Atlas returns data as JSON. The data contains information about objects and, in the case of retrieving multiple objects, presents itself wrapped in an envelope.

Enveloped Object List

When retrieving multiple objects via a GET request the top-level keys contain information about pagination and data type. In this case the data itself is available in a key named data.

{
    "object": "list",
    "has_next": true,
    "has_previous": false,
    "current_page": 1,
    "total_pages": 2,
    "data": [{
        "object": "cac.class_tag",
        ...
    }]
}

Individual objects format

When retrieving with an individual object no envelope is used. In this each object is given an object key to determine its type:

{
    "object": "cac.class_tag",
    ... // the object's fields
}