Bulk Read APIs - An Overview
Bulk Read API allows you to fetch a large set of data. This API is very useful whenever you require to export a large amount of data or to take a backup of your data without big impact on your API limits.
This is an asynchronous API, meaning that the response of your request is not available immediately. You will be notified to the callback URL when the data is ready to download or you can choose to check the job status periodically.
The results are available only as a downloadable CSV file or an ICS file.
You can export the records as an ICS file only for the Events module.
How it Works
Step 1 : Create a bulk read job
Create(or make) a POST API call, by providing the module, the list of fields to be exported and a criteria, to filter the records. It will create an asynchronous job and return a unique identifier param, 'id', which is the reference of your request.
Step 2: Check job status
If you require the system to automatically notify you on the job completion, you can simply provide the 'callback' URL while creating a bulk read job. Else, you can also choose to check the status of the job at periodic intervals, by making a GET API call using the 'id' of the job.
Step 3 : Download the result
When the job is completed successfully, the 'download_url' is available in the 'result' attribute of the response of the API. Now, you can download the result of the job by calling the 'download_url'. A ZIP file will get downloaded, containing the CSV or ICS file within it.