PAR Punchh APIs Now Available on Postman Workspace

“At PAR, we’re committed to offering our Customers and Partners the best possible experience when integrating with our products. We’re a proud Developer Plus organization and believe developers play a central role in building and executing a successful product strategy for their organizations. Building API integrations can be a daunting proposition. However, with the right technical resources and support, it can be simplified. The PAR Developer Relations group is on a mission to enable third-party developers with rich documentation, sample applications, code libraries, and strong technical support – all with the view of building integrations with PAR effectively and efficiently.” Rahul Aurora, Director, Developer Relations @ PAR Punchh

API integrations are a crucial component of a successful restaurant technology stack, enabling seamless communication among different platforms. PAR Punchh APIs allow brands to consolidate customer data from various sources, such as online ordering, mobile apps and on-premise visits into a single, unified view. This enables restaurants to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ preferences, purchase history, and behaviors to inform menu engineering, loyalty strategies, and so much more.

So, today we’re excited to announce our Postman workspace – PAR Tech APIs (Official) – into the suite of tools available to our software development partners! If you’re not familiar with Postman, it is a user-friendly tool designed to facilitate HTTP API calls to any service with a published REST API. Its interface allows users to input HTTP request data, execute the call, and capture the corresponding HTTP response data. With user friendly features and collaboration tools, Postman has become a household name in the tech industry. Numerous organizations that offer HTTP APIs for their products or services provide publicly accessible Postman collections. You can easily locate the PAR Tech APIs (Official) within this list now.

The inclusion of Postman collections presents an additional avenue for understanding how to leverage the PAR Punchh APIs effectively. The collections included in this workspace demonstrate not just the depth of PAR Product capabilities but also prove how easy it can be to integrate with them. The creators of these collections are either developers or have prior development experience. With ease of development in mind, these sample collections are designed to demonstrate real business scenarios. They come packaged with ready to use environments and test scripts to get you up and running in minutes! All collections come enabled with automation and can be executed with the click of a button.

As highlighted above, these collections are organized into folders that align with natural business processes, which is particularly valuable in relation to Punchh APIs due to their reliance on sequential API calls for executing various business flows. This approach facilitates comprehension as it demonstrates how data acquired from one API call serves as input for subsequent calls — a concept that can be challenging when solely relying on an API reference document but becomes more manageable through observing a sequence of Punchh API calls.

Sometimes information in the HTTP requests must be generated or calculated, such as usernames, and security signatures. For that we have pre-request scripts in each API call. Sometimes HTTP response data must be sifted and saved for future API calls or tested to ensure that the HTTP call succeeded. For this we have post-response scripts for each API call.

The following example shows the environment variables, then the PAR Punchh Platform Functions API folder on the left:

There are many scenarios here, but let’s focus on the longest one. The Add/Remove Users to/from Custom Segment folder comprises 6 API calls to show how to use the Custom Segment APIs.

1. First a user is created with a randomly generated name, email, etc. This information is saved in environment variables to be used in subsequent calls.
2. Then a custom segment is created with a randomly generated name. This information is saved in an environment variable to be used in subsequent calls.
3. The user created in step 1 is added to the custom segment created in step 2.
4.  The custom segment is searched to see if the user is in the segment.
5. The user is removed from the custom segment.
6.  The custom segment is searched to see if the user is in the segment.

This shows a walkthrough of the code to add users to a custom segment, including parameters, headers, request body, and pre-request and post-response scripts.

Next, how to select the environment and then run the code is explained.

See how to browse the results from running the folder. The results show the API call and the tests passed in the middle, and the request headers, request body, and response body.

The PAR Punchh Postman collections are also designed to complement the PAR Punchh Certification Matrices. To certify standard integrations such as POS, Online Ordering etc., PAR Punchh uses comprehensive certification matrices. Each matrix is a list of use cases to help developers build integrations and to help partners certify their integration with PAR Punchh. We’ve designed the Postman collections to align with the use cases on the certification matrices. The idea is that a new integration developer reads the use-cases in a certification matrix, and then initially tests them against a test environment using the Postman collections. This shows the developer how to gather pre-requisite data, call the APIs, and optionally extract data from the API responses which helps in quickly understanding the minutiae of developing a successful integration.

Early feedback from select partners tells us that they find these Postman collections incredibly useful, both to understand how the APIs work and to give them working examples from which to build their software. Not to mention, they’re shortening development cycles and helping them go to market faster. If you are a PAR Punchh development partner, and wish to try these Postman collections, you can log into our Developer Portal and find instructions on the Punchh API Postman Collections page.

PAR Punchh also welcomes contributions to our Postman collections from our development partners. Please contact your Punchh CSM if you wish to contribute. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to share it in the Comments section of the Postman Collections. We’re actively building our collection suite and welcome your feedback!