sharee.bike-Wiki/3.-sharee.bike-API-description.md

## sharee.bike API description
Version 4.1.23.22

The document serves as a technical reference for the sharee.bike rental bike platform for rental bike client development. The rental bike management server COPRI serves as the backend system.

### 1. Intro
The data exchange format is based on HTTP's REST methods.

- COPRI expects the client-side https requests to be "urlencoded" (https post, https get).
- The server-side https responses are delivered by COPRI in JSON format.

**Multi-operator rental bike booking system** implements a decentralized rental bike booking system across multiple sharee operator instances. Each operator instance is exclusively available to a rental bike operator for the administrative management of the operator rental bike data. The client-side user authentication takes place via the *primary COPRI-server (single-sign-on)*. Successful user authentication can be recognized by an *authcookie* of at least 30 characters in the JSON response. An empty *authcookie* means that the user is not authenticated.

**Rental bike bookings** are only possible after successful user authentication.

The primary server (uri_primary) is used for:
- request=authentication
- request=authout
- request=stations_available
- request=user_bikes_occupied
- request=user_minianswer

The operator server (uri_operator) responsible for the rental process is used for:
- request=bikes_available
- request=booking_request
- request=booking_update
- request=user_feedback

**encoding** UTF-8. All scalar JSON values ​​are delivered as data type "char" (text).

**Glossary**
| table-column | value     | description                                          |
|--------------|-----------|------------------------------------------------------|
| Format       | text>=8   | UTF-8 encoded characters with a character length >= 8   |
| Format       | date time | ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss) timestamp |
| Format       | object    | sub-datatype JSON Object                             |
| Format       | array     | datatype Array                             |
| Required     | +         | Field assignment mandatory                               |
| Required     | o         | Field assignment optional                                |

The user authentication expects the following 4 parameters.
- user_id: `mail@example.tld`
- user_pw: `example-pw`
- hw_id: `unique-system-identifier`
- merchant_id: `your merchant id` (for id contact us)

The *hw_id* with at least 16 characters must be unique. In live operation, the hw_id should be read from the client system (unique-system-identifier). After successful authentication, an *authcookie* is generated on the server side from the *authorization* parameters.
**Requests** in the context of rental bike bookings, a valid *authcookie* is always expected in REST, which authenticates the user after a successful login and authorizes him to use the system.
No prior user authentication is required to query the available stations and rental bikes. An *authcookie* with the *merchant_id* customer ID is expected as a minimum requirement. I.e. **authcookie=merchant_id**