Best practices

This section provides essential guidelines for building integrations with the Smartsheet API. Following these recommendations ensures that your application is efficient, scalable, and easy to maintain. These guides focus on optimizing API calls to prevent rate limiting, managing data synchronization through modern event-driven architectures, and implementing effective debugging workflows to resolve integration issues quickly.

Articles in this section:

• Looping - This article discusses the importance of efficient data retrieval when using "for loops" in your code. It advises against placing API calls (such as search requests) inside a loop. Instead, the best practice is to fetch the entire dataset once (for example, a whole sheet) and perform the necessary logic or searching on the local return data, significantly reducing the total number of network requests.

• Object details vs. list summaries - This guide explains the difference between "List All" endpoints and specific "Get" endpoints. To optimize performance, Smartsheet returns abbreviated objects when listing multiple items (like all sheets). You should use specific ID-based endpoints to retrieve full object details and leverage include and exclude query parameters to refine the data returned to only what is necessary.

• Handling incremental Smartsheet data updates - This comprehensive guide outlines how to keep local applications synchronized with Smartsheet data without repeatedly fetching entire datasets.

  It highlights two primary methods:

  • Webhooks provides real-time notifications for changes to specific sheet resources.

  • Event Reporting allows for polling organizational-level changes, including critical permission updates and access rights modifications.

• Troubleshooting - This article provides a framework for debugging API integration issues. It recommends isolating problems by testing raw requests using the Try it interface in this site, or tools like cURL or Postman to determine if an error lies in the request format or the application code. It also emphasizes inspecting full request/response traces, checking capitalization (lowercase for endpoints versus camelCase for parameters), and using logging or proxy tools like Fiddler to monitor traffic.