With the first half of 2023 coming to an end, we thought it would be worthwhile to briefly highlight some of the latest changes to our fatsecret Platform API.
More resources via Postman and Github
A few weeks ago, we published an extensive Postman as well as Github library to make it even easier to get started integrating our fatsecret Platform API. You can find our respective repositories here:
For Postman please see https://www.postman.com/fatsecret
For Github please see https://github.com/fatsecret-group
Our dedicated developer forum remains available here: https://groups.google.com/g/fatsecret-platform-api
New API method naming convention
As you might have noticed on Github or Postman, we have decided to follow a more universal and usage based API method naming convention, moving away from the plain technical method string. For example, our popular auto-complete search algorithm method can now be found in our documentation under “autocomplete search expression” whereby it was previously called “foods.autocomplete”. Similarly, our barcode scanning capabilities changed from “food.find_id_for_barcode” to “Find id for barcode”.
Please note that all link urls have not changed and remain the same.
Improved structure for Profile and non-Profile related calls as part of OAuth1.0
Historically many developers used our 3-legged OAuth capabilities (available via OAuth1.0) and we plan to continue supporting these methods. However, we realized that the structure provided in our documentation made it difficult to differentiate between regular OAuth1.0 API calls (such as food.get, foods.autocomplete or food.find_id_for_barcode) and the profile management capabilities. We have now split them and listed all profile related calls separately and grouped at the bottom of the OAuth1.0 documentation.
More visibility for our API localization nutrition data capabilities
We have listened to your feedback around making our API localization capabilities more visible and all the information on how to return localized nutrition results (available for 70+ countries and 23 languages) is now available in contextually relevant places as well as being located in our REST API documentation.
By default, every API query will be made against our US dataset and in the English language. If you are interested in using our localization capabilities to make queries to non-US datasets, please get in touch.
Some developers who prefer using and receiving JSON (instead of xml) have previously reported issues with the JSON array serialization which have now been addressed. As part of this release, we have published some new updated API calls such as:
Food_sub_categories.get.v2
Unicode characters when using OAuth1.0
Finally, we have been made aware that some of you have had issues with certain unicode characters when generating OAuth1.0 signatures which have now been addressed.
If you want to learn more about us or our developer community, please get in touch or visit our dedicated developer forum.
Thanks for your ongoing support,
The fatsecret Platform API Team
