Concepts

The rules every Manifold API follows. Learn them once and every operation reads the same way.

• Identifiers. Every id Manifold mints is a short prefix and a UUID, such as ord_ for an order, so an id sent to the wrong place fails at once.
• Idempotency and retries. Every Manifold write is safe to send twice: most by a key you send, the rest by what they do. How each works, and how to retry a call safely.
• Facts and the journal. Every change in Manifold is recorded as a fact in its service's journal, in the same step as the change itself. Here is what that means for you.
• Errors. How Manifold reports a refused or failed request: the status codes it uses, the tagged error body, and which errors are safe to retry.
• Authentication and app tokens. How to get a token for the Manifold API: a person's token for one organization, the app tokens Manifold's own apps use, and the session token an app's page receives.
• Scopes and roles. How roles grant scopes, how each operation names the scopes it needs, and why nobody can grant more than they hold.
• Read-only mode and the mirror lock. What a read-only organization holds back, what the mirror lock protects while you import from another system, and what going live changes.
• Webhooks. How apps hear about changes in Manifold: subscribing to topics, the signed deliveries, retries and the delivery log.
• Paging, events and as-of reads. How Manifold lists page through results, how to replay a service's events, and how to read data as it stood at a past moment.