Make an API Call to external APIs
In this guide, you'll discover how to allow chat to make API calls to external APIs.
Prerequisites
To move forward, you don't need to have a specific workflow ready, but to grasp the topic better, we strongly encourage you to follow along starting from our previous guide.
It would be also great if you're familiar with the JSONPlaceholder API, as we will be using it in this guide.
What is an Api Call Tool?
The Api Call Tool is a block designed to enhance your chat's functionality, enabling it to make API calls to both internal and external APIs.
Because each block can access the organization's secrets, you can seamlessly integrate APIs that require specific permissions or authorizations.
How to configure an Api Call Tool?
Before we begin, ensure you've created an alias for your workflow to preserve your configuration. If you're unsure how to do this, check out our guide. previous guide.
Api Call Tool requires a bit more effort to configure compared to, for example, the Document Search. Let's tackle it step by step.
Use a basic GET
If you aim to give your chat access to open endpoints that don't need any authorization parameters, the task is relatively straightforward. Simply add the Api Call Tool block, connect it just as you did with the Document Search, and fill in the required configurations such as url and description.
As observed, the chat can easily utilize this block to fetch posts when we ask questions related to the topic. Certainly, you're not restricted to just simple GET requests. You can execute almost any HTTP request methods!
Use GET with dynamic parameters
The first example was fairly straightforward, but let's be real, in most cases, we need to pass some parameters to the URL or headers.
Suppose we want the chat to fetch details about a specific post. This can be achieved by specifying the parameters that the Api Call Tool requires, using JSONSchema.
As you can see, we have specified in the parameters that the Api Call Tool requires an ID parameter. We can then incorporate this parameter into the URL by enclosing it within {{}}.
Similarly, you can use parameters in headers just like we did with the URL! Read more about it in the Api Call Tool documentation.
Use multiple API Call Tools
Above example is already quite intresting but let's be honest it can be even more!
Instead of directly passing the ID of the post to the prompt, we can combine two Api Call Tool blocks that we've already tested. This will allow the chat to extract the ID from a list of posts and then retrieve details about a specific post.
In the example above, after asking for "details of two sample posts," the chat first fetches the list of posts by using PostsList tool and then uses their IDs to fetch their details by using PostDetails. We didn't need to specify any response parsers or anything similar. Cool, right?
When you have multiple tools attached to the chat, it's crucial to assign the correct name and description to each tool. This approach enables the chat to understand what information each tool can provide and use the appropriate one accordingly.