Technical aspects

There are a few things to consider when developing an application that uses the Public Value API.

API key

Transmit the API key as value of the x-api-key header.

Don't hard-code districts

Since the list of districts may change in the future, it should always be loaded from the /districts endpoint and not stored statically in your application.

Special character

Special characters in URL parameters must be URL-encoded. For example to query the services of "Düsseldorf" encode as: /services?district=D%C3%BCsseldorf.

More information:

• Wikipedia article "URL-Encoding"
• MDN page "encodeURIComponent()"

CORS

The API supports CORS, with any origin allowed. Thus, the API can also be used in browser-based applications without any problems.

More information:

• Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) MDN page

Caching

The server caches the responses for some time. The cache duration corresponds to the value of max-age or s-maxage in the response header Cache-Control. When developing an application, it makes sense to cache the API response for a comparable duration.

The Cache-Control header values of the different endpoints can be found in the downloadable API specification at endpoints.

More information:

• MDN page "Cache-Control"