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After teaching myself to interact with the Access API, I found the docs a bit lacking with regards to onboarding. My discovery process was basically the following:
Tried onboarding to Alchemy only to remember they're no longer partnered with Flow - mention of Alchemy should be removed to avoid confusion
Figure out how to interact with a gRPC API - settled on gRPCurl as my cli client
Figure out how to get the API definition so I could interact with the API using my client - I ended up importing access.proto from flow/protobuf/flow/access/access.proto
This then allowed me to interact with the API, but clearer docs would've saved me time and confusion. After seeing we have an OpenAccess REST API, I download Swagger Viewer VS Code extension. Once I did, I was able to preview and interact with the API in a simple UI, making requests significantly easier (see screenshot below).
Suggestion
Based on my onboarding experience, I'd recommend a couple things:
Update the docs to remove outdated material
Include mention of REST API
Add context for:
Interacting with a gRPC API, maybe linking to a learning resource on how to do so and a suggested open-source client like gRPCurl
Examples of a few commands using the suggested client(s)
Interacting with REST API, either via cli and/or documenting how one would leverage Swagger for ease of use
One last request that, if possible, would probably be its own issue - adding reflection to the gRPS API. This would allow them to simply list the API methods so that devs don't have to load the .proto themselves.
Introduction
After teaching myself to interact with the Access API, I found the docs a bit lacking with regards to onboarding. My discovery process was basically the following:
access.proto
fromflow/protobuf/flow/access/access.proto
This then allowed me to interact with the API, but clearer docs would've saved me time and confusion. After seeing we have an OpenAccess REST API, I download Swagger Viewer VS Code extension. Once I did, I was able to preview and interact with the API in a simple UI, making requests significantly easier (see screenshot below).
Suggestion
Based on my onboarding experience, I'd recommend a couple things:
One last request that, if possible, would probably be its own issue - adding reflection to the gRPS API. This would allow them to simply list the API methods so that devs don't have to load the
.proto
themselves.P.S. Bonus issue - the link in
protobuf/README.md
is broken