Documentation

Register for a key

In order to get started, you need to register for a key. The type of key you require depends on what data you wish to access and what your application is for.

Authentication

An access key is required for all requests to the API and can be obtained by registration. This key, combined with the signature explained below, is required to get any access to the API. If you do not provide an access key, or provide an invalid key or signature, the server will return an HTTP 403 error.

Your secret token is used to calculate the correct signature for each API request and must never be disclosed. Once issued, it is never transmitted back or forward. The API server holds a copy of your secret token, which it uses to check that you have signed each request correctly.

You calculate the signature using the HMAC-SHA1 algorithm:

• Build the full API request URL, including your access key but excluding the server domain - eg /events?festival=book&key=12345. See the note below on URL encoding.
• Calculate the hmac hash of the url using the sha1 algorithm and your secret token as the key.
• Append the hex-encoded hash to your url as the signature parameter

Signature examples

• PHP
• Python

$api_key    = '12345678';
$secret_key = '135fa25acs33';
$query      = '/events?filter=that&key='.$api_key;
$signature  = hash_hmac('sha1', $query, $secret_key);
$url        = 'https://api.edinburghfestivalcity.com'.$query.'&signature='.$signature;

import hmac
import hashlib
api_key     = '12345678'
secret_key  = '135fa25acs33'
query       = '/events?filter=that&key=' + api_key
signature   = hmac.new(secret_key, query, hashlib.sha1).hexdigest()
url         = 'https://api.edinburghfestivalcity.com' + query + '&signature=' + signature

Valid request URL:

https://api.edinburghfestivalcity.com/events?festival=jazz&key=12345678&signature=e471178c45d33d7a37f99f74f8ff59d97749e7bf

Access to Fringe listings

To access live Edinburgh Festival Fringe data you will need to apply for approval. All users can access a set of randomised Fringe data for testing, which you can request by including the festival=demofringe parameter in your search terms. All users have access to live listings data for events from the other participating festivals.

Querying the API

URL endpoints

The API service currently exposes 2 resources at:

https://api.edinburghfestivalcity.com

Available query parameters

You can filter the list of events with any or all of the following optional parameters.

Synchronising with a local database

If you're using the API to feed a high-traffic site, or to merge with data from other sources, you may want to keep a local copy of our data. All the festival listings change over time, so you'll need to regularly synchronise this to keep it up to date. You're required to do this at least once every 24 hours, but we recommend more often if you can.

Each event has a url field that is guaranteed to be unique and constant even if the event's title / date / etc changes. This field is the event's ID in the API : we strongly recommend storing this and using it to match up data between each import.

To fetch just the updated events, use the modified_from query parameter with a time ten minutes before your last request. For example: ?modified_from=2017-02-13+09:50:00. Note that this query will also return cancelled and deleted events : see the event status documentation.

Event Status

Events should only be matched or changes tracked based on the unique url key in the response. It is essential that you do not attempt to match similar looking events on their titles, venues etc as these are likely or known to change.

By default, API responses do not include events that have been removed from the original festival's listings or where they are explicitly marked as cancelled in the data we receive. For most API queries, you should consider all events received as being active and display them accordingly.

However, if you include a modified_from parameter in your search query, the API may also return inactive events. This is to ensure you can consistently update any local cached or stored versions of the data when events are deleted or cancelled. The JSON formats include a status field for each event which should be interpreted as follows:

As a fallback for backwards compatibility with clients that do not properly handle the status field, the API also amends the title, description and performances list for events that have been deleted or cancelled.

Response formats

You must pass an Accept header with your request specifying the response format you require. The only supported response format for new applications is application/json;ver=2.0.

Heads up! Future improvements to the API will be backwards compatible with these response formats, but may add additional fields. You should only process API responses with a suitable parser library - attempting to use regular expressions or text libraries may cause your application to break in future.

The schema of the returned data is consistent across all festivals, but there are significant variations in the level of data completeness between events and festivals. Where no value is available, the API will return null values - you should ensure your application treats and displays these values as "Unknown" rather than for example as equivalent to a boolean false or numerical zero. Before building any application reliant on a particular field, we strongly recommend exploring the range and availability of values across the festivals you wish to include.

{
  "age_category": "12+",
  "artist": "Dream The Idle",
  "artist_type": "Professional",
  "categories": {
    "strand_titles": [
      "Epic Journeys"
    ],
    "subjects": [
      "Travel",
      "Exploration"
    ],
    "keywords": [
      {
        "category": "Countries",
        "keywords": [
          "America",
          "England"
        ]
      },
      {
        "category": "Artforms",
        "keywords": [
          "Physical Theatre",
          "Storytelling"
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  "code": "DREAMIDLE",
  "country": "ENGLAND",
  "description": "beautiful; attempting doomed connect to willed mini-epic man searching in this a is one Al with Ridiculous He's fail Grandad to tropical Northumberland. rainforest... and adventure he is to never for a yet triumph. knew. an",
  "description_teaser": "One man's beautiful attempt to connect",
  "disabled": {
    "audio": false,
    "audio_dates": "",
    "captioning": false,
    "captioning_dates": "",
    "other_services": false,
    "other_services_dates": "",
    "other_services_information": "",
    "signed": false,
    "signed_dates": ""
  },
  "discounts": {
    "friends": true,
    "group": true,
    "passport": true,
    "schools": true,
    "two_for_one": true
  },
  "festival": "Fringe",
  "festival_id": "fringe",
  "fringe_first": false,
  "genre": "Theatre",
  "genre_tags": "physical theatre, storytelling",
  "images": {
  },
  "latitude": -3.1871529999999999,
  "longitude": 55.948039000000001,
  "non_english": false,
  "performance_space": {
    "age_limit": "",
    "age_limited": false,
    "capacity": 50,
    "name": "The Aviary",
    "wheelchair_access": ""
  },
  "performances": [
    {
      type:"in-person",
      "price_type: "paid",
      "is_at_fixed_time": true,
      "price": 12,
      "concession": 10,
      "concession_additional": null,
      "concession_family": null,
      "price_string": "£12 (£10)",
      "start": "2011-06-29 11:15:00",
      "end": "2011-06-29 11:45:00",
      "duration_minutes": 30,
      "title": null
    }
  ],
  "performers_number": 1,
  "status": "active",
  "sub_venue": null,
  "title": "The Station: Fourstones",
  "twitter": "theidledream",
  "updated": "2011-07-01 02:20:20",
  "url": "https://api.edinburghfestivalcity.com/events/124ae5df40eb3f455460a1c5a8c3f16c0ffcf024",
  "venue": {
    "address": "The Pleasance 140",
    "box_office_fringe": false,
    "box_office_opening": "From Aug 5 10:00-22:00",
    "cafe_description": "Cold drinks available.",
    "code": "124",
    "description": "classic Courtyard. Just new the a world. rising the theatres drama, breathtaking from studio theatre award-winning, around intimate writing, companies, from comedy the and best of road dance down feast physical talent Zoo's the emerging host Pleasance",
    "disabled_description": "assistance welcome, equalities access people, impaired for visually dogs trained.\r\n\r\n Improved staff",
    "email": null,
    "fax": null,
    "has_bar": false,
    "has_booking_over_card": false,
    "has_booking_over_phone": false,
    "has_booking_over_web": false,
    "has_cafe": false,
    "name": "Zoo",
    "phone": "0131 662 6892",
    "position": {
      "lat": 55.945683000000002,
      "lon": -3.1811180000000001
    },
    "post_code": "EH8 9RR",
    "web_address": "www.zoofestival.co.uk"
  },
  "warnings": "",
  "website": "http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/abbi-patrix-and-linda-edsjoe-a-concert-of-stories"
}

Event Images

The API provides a consistent interface for accessing listings images for events across all participating festivals, subject to availability.

Usage rights, hosting, linking and protocols

Most of the images are only approved for distribution as part of the participating festivals' marketing and promotion activity. You are welcome to use and display the provided images alongside both historical and active listings content, generally accompanied by at least the name of and link to the festival website. Use of the images independently may be a breach of copyright. We are working on more specific guidance, but in the meantime if you are not sure whether your proposed image usage meets these requirements please contact us to discuss.

Images are hosted on Amazon S3 and are available over both HTTP and HTTPS connections. The API response returns a scheme-relative URL - eg //images.api.edinburghfestivalcity.com/ab/cd/ef/9948272323-original.jpg. This URL format will trigger browsers to automatically use either HTTP or HTTPS depending on whether the connection to your own server was over a secure connection. Some parsing libraries (including PHP) do not properly recognise scheme-relative URLs so you may find you need to add the appropriate http: or https: prefix for machine usage.

For low and medium traffic applications, you are welcome to serve the provided URLs directly in your application or website, subject to the normal API terms and conditions. If you are operating a high traffic site we ask that you contact us to discuss fair usage and any bandwidth limitations before launching your site.

Image types

The shape and size of source images varies by festival, depending on what the image was originally intended for. The type property of each image provides a hint as to intended use. You may also wish to check the orientation property as well as the width and height of the original image in order to filter out images that may not be in a suitable format for your use case.

Image versions

In addition to the original format, we provide resized versions of each image. Small images will not be scaled up, so only the original, square-75 and square-150 versions are guaranteed to be present.

Libraries & Examples

• 

  PHP

  We provide a PHP client https://github.com/festivalslab/api-client-php which is also available through composer with composer require festivalslab/api-client-php

• 

  Rubygem

  Gareth Adams has contributed the open-source (MIT licence) festivals_lab rubygem for accessing the API. It's in alpha, and not officially supported, but covers the whole of the current JSON API. For documentation and installation instructions see the festivals_lab gem on github.

Implementations in other languages should be relatively straightforward. If there's a particular language you think we should provide official packages for, or if you have developed a library you'd like to share with the community, please do contact us.