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Have you ever wanted to build an API for your no code Web App or Dashboard? In this blog post we explore how it can be done. This tutorial will work for you no matter whether you use Chartmat, Stacker or Glide Apps as your app builder. For the purpose of building your API we assume you use Google Spreadsheets as the database for your web app and NoCodeAPI as the tool to create your API.
Choosing the right Set-Up
To build an API for your web app without coding you ideally start off from a no code web app. For the purpose of this tutorial we assume you have built your web app or dashboard using Chartmat. If you have not yet build your no code web app you can simply follow these three steps
- Sign up for a Chartmat Account
- Connect your Google Drive Account to your Chartmat workspace
- Connect your Chartmat Board to your Google Spreadsheet
- Build your web app or dashboard on Chartmat with Google Spreadsheets as your database
Once you have successfully created your web app or dashboard you can start building an API for it. For the purpose of this tutorial we use NoCodeAPI as the tool to create an API without any coding knowledge required. NoCodeAPI offers a free tier for trying out their product.
Build your No Code API
Since the data of your Charmat web app lives inside your Google Spreadsheet you need to access the spreadsheet linked to your Chartmat app in order to create an API for your web app. NoCodeAPI offers a step by step video tutorial on how you can make rows inside your Google Spreadsheet accessible through an API.
In order to create the API for your Google Spreadsheet follow these steps:
- Select Google Sheets as Application for building your API
- Authenticate Google Sheets with your NoCodeAPI account
- Provide the ID of your Spreadsheet for which you want to create API access
That’s it! By following these easy steps you successfully created your API without any coding knowledge.
Access data from your API
Once you created your API you can start accessing the data from your spreadsheet which essentially is synchronized with the data of your no code web app at any time. In order to access data from your Spreadsheet simply follow these steps:
- Use a service that supports API calls or integrate the API in a full stack app
- Copy the API endpoint from NoCodeAPI as explained in the video tutorial
- Specify the parameters for your API call such as the tab ID of your Google Spreadsheet
- Trigger the API call and the API will return the data from your spreadsheet in the JSON format
As you receive the JSON API response you can then access the data through a coding language or another no code tool like Zapier or Integromat.
To Summarize
As you build your no code web app or dashboard you might encounter the situation that you want to make the data from your app accessible to another software. You can easily achieve that without the necessity of any coding knowledge or development set up. In this tutorial we used Chartmat as the tool to build a web app, Google Spreadsheet as the database and NoCodeAPI as the tool to make your data accessible through an API.
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