Skip to content

Getting Started

The Kendis API lets you read your planning data programmatically. This page walks you through your first successful request in a few minutes.

What you need

  1. A Kendis account with access to the data you want to read.
  2. A personal API key (generated from your profile — see Authentication).
  3. Your company identifier — either your subdomain or your company prefix, depending on the API method (see Base URLs & methods).

The 3-step flow for board data

Most board-scoped data follows the same discovery chain — you can't fetch items until you know which board they live on:

graph LR
  A[List Collections] --> B[List Boards]
  B --> C[Fetch Items / Objectives / Risks]
Step Why
1. List Collections Collections represent workspaces. You need a collection ID to scope boards.
2. List Boards Returns each board's id — the boardId every data endpoint needs.
3. Fetch data Call the items / objectives / risk endpoint with that boardId.

Never copy IDs from the browser URL

The ID shown in the Kendis web app URL is a session ID, not a board ID — they are different (often off-by-one). Always obtain identifiers from List Collections and List Boards.

Your first request

Once you have a key, a single curl confirms everything is wired up:

curl -H "Authorization: Basic <base64-token>" \
     "https://{yourcompany}.kendis.io/api/v1/strategic-themes?fields=all"

A 200 OK with a JSON body means your key, encoding, and subdomain are all correct. If you get a 401, revisit Authentication; for other codes see Errors.

Where to go next

  •   Authentication

    Generate a key and build the Basic auth header.

    Authentication

  •   Base URLs & methods

    Pick the right host for each API.

    Base URLs

  •   Conventions

    Response envelopes, field selection, null handling.

    Conventions