Yodlee Developer Portal – New Features/Enhancements
A New Look and Feel for the June 2021 Release
This release of the Envestnet | Yodlee developer portal introduces significant styling and visual improvements to our web pages. Additional specific upgrades include:
- Docu-centric design
- Greatly improved the site search feature.
- Simplified the browsing pathways through the documentation.
- Replaced the “Try it out” feature of interactive API calls.
- Added Postman collections.
Read on for more details on these updates.
Docu-centric Design
We redesigned our developer website to make information available more quickly and simply. We provide a single-screen view of all products and offerings. We are now using standardized templates to describe our products, reducing the number of clicks needed to find the details. For the API products, we created a smoothly scrolling 3-panel custom UX control. This can be reached in 2 clicks; click Documentation in the top menu, then click any API card at the top of the page.
Improved Search Feature
We think developers will love the new and improved search feature. It finds many more references for a search term than the previous search feature. Access search by clicking the magnifying glass icon at the top of most web pages, as before.
Simplified Browsing Pathways
We have streamlined the Dashboard experience for Sandbox, Development, and Production environment reducing the number of clicks. The Sandbox dashboard screens have been reduced from 3 to 1, while the launch+ tier dashboard screens have been reduced from 4 to 2. The dashboard performance has been improved which means that log-in will be quicker.
Replaced “Try it out” on API Reference Page
The “Try it out” feature allowed developers to make API calls interactively on our API reference page. That worked quite well for individual API calls, but it didn’t guide developers into the sequences of calls that accomplish complete account verification or aggregation. We have replaced “Try it out” with carefully curated trails under the name “Quickstart”.
We have a Quickstart trail to guide a new developer through the sequence of calls to verify an end-user account. We intend to build out Quickstart to include other useful sequences of API calls. Quickstart uses the industry-standard Postman tool to make real API calls without writing many lines of code.
Postman Collection Expanded
Postman collections are small “files” of instruction sequences for Postman. If you find yourself repeating a series of steps when using Postman, it is common to roll those steps into a collection. In addition to the Verification quickstart collection, you can now also use two other Postman collections available here:
- The Getting Started collection has a basic set of 4 API calls (Get token, providers, accounts, and transactions) to run in Postman.
- The Comprehensive collection has all our API calls that you will find enabled in our development and production environments.
Both collections make it easy for you to provide the parameters and HTTP headers needed in successful API calls using the Postman tool. All our collections support the use of the older JWT authentication approach, as well as the newer Client Credential authentication mechanism.
OpenAPI Specification - Minor Updates
We have updated our specification of the Yodlee API to improve compliance with version 3 of the OpenAPI Specification standard. As before, you can download the YAML file containing the OpenAPI Specification from our Github account.
Account Profile Moved
Developer Profile details (phone number, email, ticketing/support, and upgrading tiers) are now separated from the developer Dashboard.
Firefox Browser
We have seen some UI limitations when using the Firefox browser. There are glitches generally with browsers that are not based on the WebKit browser engine. We are working to investigate this.