Knowledge Vault API

Contentstack is a headless, API-first content management system (CMS) that provides everything you need to power your web or mobile properties. To learn more about Contentstack, visit our website or refer to our documentation site to understand what we do.

This documentation provides information on endpoints, operations, parameters, and responses for the Knowledge Vault API. It includes ingesting, updating, deleting and getting usage from the Knowledge Vault.

The Knowledge Vault API requests acts as a central repository for brand-related data, offering content ingestion, usage tracking, updating, and deletion functionalities.

• US (North America, or NA): https://ai.contentstack.com/brand-kits
• Europe (EU): https://eu-ai.contentstack.com/brand-kits
• Azure North America (Azure NA): https://azure-na-ai.contentstack.com/brand-kits
• Azure Europe (Azure EU): https://azure-eu-ai.contentstack.com/brand-kits
• GCP North America (GCP NA): https://gcp-na-ai.contentstack.com/brand-kits

Knowledge Vault uses token-based authentication. You can use the Authtoken along with the Organization UID to make API requests. Read more about the different types of tokens.

For Authtoken-based authentication

• Pass the user Authtoken against the authtoken parameter as header.
• Pass the OAuth Token value against the authorization parameter as header.
• Pass the Brand Kit UID against the brand_kit_uid parameter as header.

How to Get Authtoken

To retrieve the authtoken, log in to your Contentstack account by using the Log into your account request under User Session. This request will return the authtoken in the response body.

You can generate multiple authtokens by executing the Log into your account request multiple times. These tokens do not have an expiration time limit. However, currently, there is a maximum limit of 20 valid tokens that a user can use per account at a time, to execute CMA requests.

Note: If you already have valid 20 tokens, creating a new authtoken will automatically cause the oldest authtoken to expire without warning.

For SSO-enabled organizations, the Log into your account request will not return the user authtoken for users who access the organization through Identity Provider login credentials. Consequently, any requests that require a user authtoken will not work. Only the owner of the organization and users with permission to access the Organization without SSO can use these APIs. Learn more about REST API Usage.

Rate limit is the maximum number of requests you can make using the Contentstack’s APIs in a given time period.

By default, the Knowledge Vault API enforces the following rate limits:

Your application will receive the HTTP 429 response code if the requests for a given time period exceed the defined rate limits.

The aforementioned limits are configurable depending on your plan. For more information, contact our Support team.

• The base URL for Knowledge Vault API for different regions can be found in the Base URL section.
• The API version can be found in the URL, e.g. brand-kits-api.contentstack.com/v1/brand-kits
• Knowledge Vault API supports GET/POST/PUT/DELETE verbs or methods.
• URL paths are written in lower case.
• Query parameters and JSON fields use lower case, with underscores (_) separating words.
• The success/failure status of an operation is determined by the HTTP status it returns. Additional information is included in the HTTP response body.
• The JSON number type is bounded to a signed 32-bit integer.

If there is something wrong with the API request, Contentstack returns an error.

Knowledge Vault uses conventional, standard HTTP status codes for errors, and returns a JSON body containing details about the error. In general, codes in the 2xx range signify success. The codes in the 4xx range indicate error, mainly due to information provided (for example, a required parameter or field was omitted). Lastly, codes in the 5xx range mean that there is something wrong with our servers; it is very rare though.

Let’s look at the error code and their meanings.

Contentstack offers you a Postman Collection that helps you try out our Knowledge Vault API. You can download this collection, connect to your Contentstack account, and try out the Knowledge Vault API with ease.

Learn more about how to get started with using the Postman Collection for Knowledge Vault API.

Knowledge Vault works as a centralized repository where you can store, manage, and organize brand-related data. You can use the Ingest Content, Get Content Usage, Update Content, and Delete Content requests.

The Knowledge Vault Postman collection is a set of preconfigured REST API requests that will make it easy for you to get started with the Contentstack APIs and try out our API requests through the popular Postman REST client.

To use the Knowledge Vault Postman collection you will need to have the Postman. You can either download the Desktop app or use Postman for Web.

Note: If you have already installed Postman for your device, go to the Download Latest Postman Collection for Knowledge Vault section.

Postman is available for Windows (x32), Windows (x64), Mac (Intel Chip / Apple Chip), and Linux environments.

Once you have installed Postman on your device, click the Run in Postman button to start working with the Knowledge Vault API endpoints for Contentstack.

Note: The Knowledge Vault Postman collection does not support the now deprecated Postman Chrome extension. Make sure you have installed the latest version of the Postman desktop app.

This opens the Fork collection into your workspace modal from where you can proceed to download/work with the Knowledge Vault Postman collection in the following three ways:

• View the Collection
• Import a Copy of the Collection
• Fork the Collection
• Download Collection from GitHub Page

Let’s look at each of the above methods in detail.

View the Collection

This option allows you to just view (and not try out) the API requests of the Postman collection.

Perform the following steps to view the Knowledge Vault API Postman collection:

1. Click the View collection link in the Fork collection into your workspace modal.
   

   A new tab opens up in your browser where you should see the latest collection preloaded in the left navigation.

   Note: If you want to try out the API requests, you can either import a copy of the collection or fork the collection.

Import a Copy of the Collection

This option allows you to import a copy of the collection into your workspace.

To import the Knowledge Vault API collection, perform the following steps:

1. Click the import a copy link in the Fork collection into your workspace modal.
   
2. In the resulting Import Collection modal within the Postman app, select a workspace and click Import to import the latest Postman collection into your selected workspace.
   

3. You will see a copy of the latest Postman collection in the left navigation panel.

Fork the Collection

This option allows you to fork, or create a copy of the collection, and perform changes to the collection without affecting the original.

To fork the Knowledge Vault API collection, perform the following steps:

1. Click the Fork Collection button in the Fork collection into your workspace modal.
   
2. This opens the Sign In page. You can either enter your login credentials and click Sign in, or sign in using your Google account or via SSO.
   
3. In the resulting Fork collection modal, if needed, enter a Fork label that lets you uniquely identify your collection and select a Workspace.

4. Under Notifications, check Watch original collection to get notified of any changes that are made to the original collection.

5. Once done, click Fork Collection to fork the Postman collection into your selected workspace.

Download Collection from GitHub Page

We have also hosted our Postman collection on GitHub. You can follow the steps mentioned in the Readme file to download and start using it.

You can also choose to watch the latest Postman collection to get notifications of new releases or updates.

To do so, click the following Watch button and select Watching.

When you download and install the latest version of the Knowledge Vault API Postman Collection, you also download and import the respective environment along with the environment variables.

Once your Environment is imported, next you need to set your Knowledge Vault account specific values.

Note: As these environment variables are referenced across multiple API requests, once you set the variables, it becomes a lot more convenient to make repeated use of the Postman Collection.

Some of the important variables that you need to set are as follows:

Note: The Knowledge Vault Postman Collection will require a valid Authtoken to make API calls. Check out the Authentication section for more details.

If you want to add your own environment variables, you can follow the procedure in the next section.

Add Other Environment Variables

To add any new environment variables for your Postman collection, perform the following steps:

1. Identify the environment variables that you want to define.
2. In the top right corner of Postman, click on the environment's dropdown and select Knowledge Vault API - Environment.
3. Click the "eye" icon present in the top right corner of Postman. It opens up in the environment variables modal. Click Edit to make changes in the variables.
4. In the VARIABLE field, enter the name of the environment variable. In the INITIAL VALUE field, enter your Knowledge Vault-account-specific value that will replace the variable when the call is made.
5. Once you have defined your variables, click Save.

Update Environment Variables

With every new API request added, we update our environment file. So, to get the latest environment variables, you need to download the collection along with the updated environment file again, compare your existing environment with the latest environment, identify and add the new variables to your existing environment.

Next, let’s see how you can run API Requests from your Knowledge Vault Postman collection using your environment.

With the Knowledge Vault Postman Collection loaded into the Postman app (on the left panel) and the environment created, you can now make API requests to the Knowledge Vault API via Postman.

To make an API request, perform the following steps:

1. Select the respective environment, Knowledge Vault API - Environment, from the dropdown.
2. Select an API Request from the Knowledge Vault Postman Collection. In this example, we will use the Get all projects request which is a part of the Projects folder.
   

   Note: If you want to make changes to your parameters or want to add parameters of your own, you can do it here.

3. Next, click Send at the top right to make the API request.
   The API call should return with a response under the Body tab in the bottom half of the screen.

We strongly advise against storing your Organization UID and authtokens in your collection permanently. If you or someone else shares the collection by mistake, other users will be able to export it along with these keys.

We recommend that you provide your Knowledge Vault account-specific Organization UID and tokens in your environment or directly to the sample requests.

Users using Authtoken

For users who use authtoken to authenticate their calls, when you make the Log in to your account API Request, your authtoken will be saved in cookies.

If you want to prevent this action, perform the steps given below:

1. Click Cookies on the far right corner.
2. In the Cookies modal under the Manage Cookies tab, click the Domains Allowlist at the bottom left.
3. Add ai.contentstack.com/brand-kits and click Add.

This will allow you to access cookies of this domain in scripts programmatically.

Note: To avoid this situation, we recommend you to use the Brand Kit UID along with the Authtoken to make valid Knowledge Vault API requests. For more information, refer to Authentication.

We keep our Postman Collection updated. To get the latest version of our Postman Collection, all you need to do is to download the Postman Collection along with the updated environment again and you are good to go.

You can also choose to watch for the latest Postman Collection updates on our GitHub repository and get notifications of new releases or updates to the repository. The GitHub Readme doc will help you with the steps that you need to follow.