Retrieve Braineet projects in JSON

This article outlines a solution to efficiently and automatically bring information from your Braineet portfolio into any source using JSON.

If you want to visualize projects in Power BI or Excel, you can go to:

Visualizing Braineet projects in Microsoft Power BI & Power Query

To retrieve data from Braineet, you can utilize the Data URL endpoint and choose Basic authentication.

Basic authentication is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. The client sends HTTP requests with the Authorization  header that contains the word Basic  word followed by a space and a base64-encoded string email:apikey . For example, to authorize as [email protected] / APIKEYCODE123  the client would send

Authorization: Basic cGllcnJlLmdvdXJsYW91ZW5AYnJhaW5lZXQuY29tOkFQSUtFWUNPREUxMjM=

Note: Because base64 is easily decoded, Basic authentication should only be used together with other security mechanisms such as HTTPS/SSL.

API Specifications

When retrieving projects from Braineet in JSON format, the data is structured as follows:

• JSON: An array of objects.
• Each object is a map[string]any , where:
  • Each key is the name of a custom field.
  • The value depends on the custom field type and can be:
    • A number (e.g., 42 ).
    • A string (e.g., "Some text" ).
    • An array of strings (if the custom field type supports multiple values, e.g., ["Option A", "Option B"] ).

[
  {
    "project_name": "New Marketing Initiative",
    "start_date": "2025-02-01",
    "budget": 50000,
    "tags": ["marketing", "sales"]
  },
  {
    "project_name": "Website Redesign",
    "start_date": "2025-04-10",
    "budget": 75000,
    "tags": ["design", "web"]
  }
]

History data

You can use the at query parameter to retrieve the state of the data as of a specific point in time. The parameter expects a datetime value in ISO 8601 format:

?at=2025-03-08T00:00:00Z

• When using this parameter, the JSON will show only the projects and custom fields that existed at that specific date and time.
• Some columns (custom fields) or rows (projects) might not appear if they did not exist yet.
• The values shown for each custom field will reflect what they were at that moment.

Only new or updated projects

You can also use the since query parameter to retrieve only new or updated projects since a specific date and time. It uses the same ISO 8601 format:

?since=2025-03-08T00:00:00Z 

• Only the fields that have been newly created or updated since this timestamp will be returned with their current values.
• If a field has not been modified, its value will appear as null (or nil in certain representations) in the returned JSON. This lets you know the field was not changed during this period.

Example Response with since

[
  {
    "project_id": 123,
    "project_name": null,
    "budget": 60000,
    "tags": null
  },
  {
    "project_id": 456,
    "project_name": "Updated Website Redesign",
    "budget": null,
    "tags": ["design", "web", "UX"]
  }
]
 

In this example:

• For the project with project_id : 123, only the budget field was modified. All other fields are null because they remain unchanged.
• For the project with project_id : 456, the project_name and tags were modified, while budget remains unchanged.