SDKs and Libraries

No official client packages are published for the All About Pawz API, and none are needed to start: the API is HTTPS and JSON, and any standard HTTP client plus the authentication header is enough. This guide states the client contract: the behaviors every client, official or hand-built, must implement: so code you write today keeps working the same way if an official client is published later. The terms that govern client software built on the API are the SDK License Terms; the rules of API use are summarized in API Policies. API access itself is issued by the Company and is not self-service; see Getting Started.

The client contract

Every conforming client does the same five things

1. It authenticates. It accepts the API key once, attaches it as the bearer token on every request (Authentication Endpoints), and never logs it, never embeds it in distributed code, and never sends it to any host other than the Platform base URL.
2. It paginates. Collection methods walk every page using the cursor the API returns (Pagination and Filtering (Pagination & Filtering)) and hand your code a single stream of results, so a walk is one loop in your application rather than cursor bookkeeping in every call site.
3. It retries correctly. Transient failures: 5xx, 429, network errors: are retried with exponential backoff and jitter, honoring the retry guidance in rate-limit responses (Rate Limit Headers). Permanent failures: other 4xx: surface immediately with the API's error shape intact (Error Codes); see Core Concepts.
4. It is idempotent. Write methods accept an idempotency key and generate a unique one when you do not provide it (Idempotency Keys), and automatic retries reuse the same key, so a retry can never double-create a product, a price, or a refund.
5. It preserves the contract. It sends money as decimal strings with currency, timestamps as ISO 8601 UTC, and ids as opaque strings, exactly as the Overview specifies: and it ignores unknown response fields rather than failing, so additive API changes do not break deployed clients.

Error handling in client code

Map the API's error shape: {"error": {"code": "…", "message": "…"}}: to distinct outcomes in your code, because the recovery differs by class

• Authentication failure (401): stop and alert a human. The key is wrong, corrupted, or revoked; retrying cannot fix any of those.
• Authorization failure (403): the key's scope or tier does not permit the call. Surface it; request scope (Authentication and Authorization) rather than probing alternatives.
• Not found (404): the id does not resolve under this account. Check the id's provenance before retrying anything.
• Validation failure (400): your request is malformed. Log the code and the request; fix the data at its source.
• Rate limited (429): back off as the headers direct. A client that treats 429 as a generic error and retries immediately is a policy problem, not a bug.
• Server failure (5xx): retry with backoff and the same idempotency key on writes.

Catch the specific class, never the general one: code that handles all failures alike will retry 401s, swallow validation errors, and double-send writes it meant to protect.

What clients do not do

A client is transport and convention, never business logic

• It does not compute prices. Prices are the price of record set through the pricing resource (Pricing); a client that adds its own arithmetic invents a second price.
• It does not decide tax, fees, or payout amounts. Those come back from the API's payment resources (Payments).
• It does not apply standing, authorization, or program decisions. Those are the Platform's, read from the API, not re-derived in client code.
• It does not reformat money or timestamps "helpfully." The decimal string the API returned is the value; converting it to a float in the client loses the precision the format exists to protect.
• It does not cache aggressively by default. Staleness tolerance is your application's decision, made per resource: prices and availability stale-cache very differently from a brand record.

A client that starts making business decisions stops being a client: two integrations on two client versions would then apply two different policies to the same data.

Building your own client

If you work in an environment without a suitable HTTP stack, build a thin client

1. One constructor holding the key and the base URL: nothing else global.
2. One request path that attaches authentication, sets JSON headers, and applies the retry policy.
3. One pagination iterator per collection pattern.
4. Idempotency-key generation on every write method.
5. Error mapping exactly as above, with the API's code preserved on every raised error.

Keep it thin. Every line of business logic in your client is a line that can drift from the Platform's behavior, and drift in client code is discovered by your users, in production, one integration at a time. Because your client and any future official client implement the same contract, moving later is mechanical: same method shapes, same error classes, same pagination pattern.

Versioning and upgrades

Pin your client dependencies in production, as you pin any dependency. The API itself changes additively and announces non-additive change in advance (Changelog; Deprecation and Breaking Changes Policy): but your client's behavior is yours: upgrade deliberately, read the release notes of anything you depend on, and test writes against your integration environment before a client upgrade reaches the process that fulfills orders. "Latest" is a development convenience; in production it is how an ordinary weekday breaks checkout.

Questions about clients: support@aapawz.com.