STARLIMS REST API & POSTMAN – Production Mode

Alright folks! If you’ve been playing with the new STARLIMS REST API and tried production mode, perhaps you’ve run into all kind of problems providing the correct SL-API-Signature header. You may wonder “but how do I generate this?” – even following STARLIMS’s c# example may yield unexpected 401 results.

At least, it did for me.

I was able to figure it out by looking at the code that reconstructs the signature on STARLIMS side, and here’s a snippet of code that works in POSTMAN as a pre-request code:

// required for the hash part. You don't need to install anything, it is included in POSTMAN
var CryptoJS = require("crypto-js");

// get data required for API signature
const dateNow = new Date().toISOString();
// thhis is the API secret found in STARLIMS key management
const privateKey = pm.environment.get('SL-API-secret');
// this is the API access key found in STARLIMS key management
const accessKey = pm.environment.get('SL-API-Auth');
// in my case, I have a {{url}} variable, but this should be the full URL to your API endpoint
const url = pm.environment.get('url') + request.url.substring(8);
const method = request.method;
// I am not using api methods, but if you are, this should be set
const apiMethod = "";

var body = "";
if (pm.request.body.raw){
    body = pm.request.body.raw;
}

// this is  the reconstruction part - the text used for signature
const signatureBase = `${url}\n${method}\n${accessKey}\n${apiMethod}\n${dateNow}\n${body}`;

// encrype signature
var data = CryptoJS.enc.Utf8.parse(signatureBase);
const hash = CryptoJS.HmacSHA256(data, privateKey);
const encodedHash = encodeURIComponent(CryptoJS.enc.Base64.stringify(hash));

// set global variables used in header
pm.globals.set("SL-API-Timestamp", dateNow);
pm.globals.set("SL-API-Signature", encodedHash);

One point of interest – if it still is not working, and if you can’t figure out why, an undocumented STARLIMS feature is to add this application setting in the web.config to view more info:

<add key="RestApi_LogLevel" value="Debug" />

I hope this helps you use the new REST API provided by STARLIMS!

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