How Do I Set Up Authentication with ISP’s API?

Please note this information is for software developers. If you are unsure about the following information, please contact your site developer.

Getting Started

In order to submit to ISP’s API, you need a username and password. If you have not integrated with ISP before, please contact us at support@ispolitical.com to get your integration setup and to obtain a token (also referred to as integration name) and password.

Basic Authentication

ISP uses basic access authentication, slightly modified to support access to multiple accounts.

Your username will be a pipe delimited concatenation of the client account name and your integration login name. That means the format would be [Account]|[Integration] and is unique for each account data is being passed to. For example, the Civil War Online Donation System (CWODS), would use Washington|CWODS as the username to submit data to the specific account called Washington.

Together with the password, a base 64 authentication string should be posted to ISP’s API at https://app.ISPolitical.com/api/PublicForms/

Example

If the integration is called CWODS, the account you are sending data to is Washington, and the password is ABC123, the submission would look like this:

Washington|CWODS:ABC123

Using base 64 encoding, that becomes V2FzaGluZ3RvbnxDV09EUzpBQkMxMjM=

If the same integration was also sending data to a different account at ISP, the base 64 encoded authorization string would be different. For example, if the second account name is Lincoln the submission would look like this:

Lincoln|CWODS:ABC123

Using base 64 encoding, that becomes TGluY29sbnxDV09EUzpBQkMxMjM=

Both examples above are from the same example integration, but the data would go into two different accounts.