Beginner examples for querying data.europa.eu APIs

Now, that we have explained how to the OpenAPI documentation works and listed the available APIs on data.europa.eu, we can provide some example API requests for the search API.

Remember, the URL for the search API is https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/. The simplest possible search is to just request all metadata without any further parameters that would reduce the search results. Looking at the documentation of the search API this can be achieved by just adding the path "search". Our first example API call looks like this:

https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/

It provides a limited list of all metadata that is stored in data.europa.eu. This list is limited, because data.europa.eu stores too much metadata and this cannot be transmitted in one single request. If you would like to get all metadata available, multiple requests would be necessary. Here, a method called paging comes into play. With paging you can split the results in "pages" and simply go through them. The examples below will showcase how to retrieve three pages of metadata via the search API:

https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/search?page=0&limit=10

https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/search?page=1&limit=10

https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/search?page=2&limit=10

Note, that these examples introduce the two parameters page and limit. Basically, the API call is asking for page 0, 1, 2 of the search results with maximum 10 results per page. The page parameter selects the requested page and limit sets the maximum number of results to be retrieved per page.

For a last example we will add a search term to the request. The following request shall return page 0 with a maximum of 100 results that match with the search term "water":

https://data.europa.eu/api/hub/search/search?page=0&limit=100&q=water

Please consult the above referenced OpenAPI documentations for more information on how to use out APIs.