WhatsAPI

Inspiration

At previous internships, we've both worked on managing and extracting data from spreadsheets of companies that really should've had a proper database, but didn't as nobody knew anything about databases or creating APIs as the teams were both non-technical.

This problem is prevalent among many non-technical business owners, or even front-end developers not familiar with the back-end, who manage their data on spreadsheets with severely limited functionality and sharing capabilities, and could use a feature that allows them to easily manage and access their data on spreadsheets.

What it does

Generates an API endpoint with documentation, an API key, and a secret from an uploaded spreadsheet. Users can use these to send requests to access and modify their spreadsheet data.

How we built it

We created a conversion from spreadsheet into SQLite, created a REST API to handle database queries, and generated basic documentation to be supplemented by the spreadsheet owner.

The spreadsheet owner uploads their spreadsheet on a webpage, are provided a generated API key and secret, and then are given their API to access their spreadsheet along with its documentation.

Challenges we ran into

Building a REST API for the first time. We spent multiple hours trying to integrate Swagger to generate the documentation, but ultimately decided not to as Swagger doesn't offer much support for creating documentation from an already built API.