Bob's People API provide powerful tools for accessing and managing employee data within your organization. These endpoints enable searching, creating, updating, and retrieving employee data.

Getting Started with People API

• Explore People endpoints: Click on the endpoints below to access detailed information on each endpoint, and try the API via the interactive Try It! option.
• Explore How to read employee data: Learn how to map the fields and their properties and how to process the response payload.
• Explore the Employee Tables endpoints: Employee fields consist of data fields and tables that store several data entries per employee. Use the employee tables endpoints to access data stored in the employee table entries.

Required Permissions

In Bob API, the fields are organized within categories, and the service user is granted permissions based on the category. This means all the fields in that granted category can be accessed.

Before accessing a field, ensure the service user has permission to access the relevant category, just as you would with a user within Bob.

For example, if you need the service user to pull employees' 'Personal contact' category, you would set permissions to:

• People’s data permissions:
  • People > Personal contact details > View selected employees' Personal contact details sections
• Access rights permissions:
  • Select “Everyone” (if you need to access all employees).
  • Or include the employee in the list of selected users.

To learn more, see Categories and permissions.

Troubleshooting permission-related issues:

1. Partial fetching/updating of Fields
   If you receive a '200 OK' response but notice that only some of the requested fields have been fetched or updated, this could indicate that the Service User's permissions do not cover all the requested data. The response will simply exclude any fields that the Service User does not have permission to access or modify.
   Important: You will not be explicitly notified that only partial permissions are available. Therefore, when testing, please ensure all expected fields are included in the response and that any permission-related issues are accounted for.
2. Empty response when using the Search with no 'fields' filter
   The 'default' search for people returns a predefined set of fields that reside in the 'root' (basic fields), 'about', 'employment', and 'work' categories. If a field is missing in the response when using the default query:
   1. Make sure you set the required Permissions for default employee fields in People Search AP.
   2. It may have been moved to another category. To learn more, see Moving fields between categories.

To learn more, see Categories and Permissions.

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Accessing historical data

When setting access to categories with historical information, setting 'view' access to the category will give you access only to the current entry, for example, the employee's effective work entry. To read the whole work history, you would need to use the tables endpoints, and set access also to the 'histories' data. To learn more, see Employee Tables.

Rate limiting

Rate limits are restrictions that our API imposes on the number of times a user can access our endpoints within a specified period of time. To learn more about rate limiting best practices, see Rate limiting.

Below is a table detailing the rate limits for each endpoint in the People's endpoints.