This article describes the structure of IoT Platform API requests and provides a sample request.

Request structure

You can send HTTP or HTTPS requests to IoT Platform.

A request uses the following syntax:

http://Endpoint/?Action=xx&Parameters
Parameter Description
Endpoint The endpoint of IoT Platform. Format: iot.${RegionId}.aliyuncs.com. Replace ${RegionId} with the ID of the region where you purchased the IoT Platform service. For more information about region IDs, see Regions and zones.

Examples:

  • China (Shanghai): iot.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com
  • Singapore: iot.ap-southeast-1.aliyuncs.com
  • US (Silicon Valley): iot.us-west-1.aliyuncs.com
  • Japan (Tokyo): iot.ap-northeast-1.aliyuncs.com
  • Germany (Frankfurt): iot.eu-central-1.aliyuncs.com
Action The operation that you want to perform. For example, to publish a message to a specified topic, you must set the Action parameter to Pub.
Parameters The request parameters of the operation. Separate multiple parameters with ampersands (&).

Request parameters include common parameters and operation-specific parameters. Common parameters include the API version number and authentication information.

The following code provides an example on how to call the Pub operation to publish a message to a topic:
Note In this example, IoT Platform is deployed in the China (Shanghai) region. The code has been formatted for ease of reading. For more information about request parameters, see Common parameters and Pub. 
https://iot.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/?Action=Pub
&Format=XML
&Version=2018-01-20
&Signature=Pc5WB8gok***1dgI%3D
&SignatureMethod=HMAC-SHA1
&SignatureNonce=15215528852396
&SignatureVersion=1.0
&AccessKeyId=LTAI4***iW5j3
&Timestamp=2017-07-19T12:00:00Z
&RegionId=cn-shanghai
...

Debugging

Alibaba Cloud provides OpenAPI Explorer to simplify API usage. You can use OpenAPI Explorer to search for API operations, call API operations, and dynamically generate the sample code of API operations for different SDKs. On the right side of the page, you can view the sample code of an SDK on the Example Code tab. On the Debugging Result tab, you can view the actual request URL and response in the JSON format.

IoT Platform API

API authorization

To ensure the security of your account, we recommend that you call API operations as a Resource Access Management (RAM) user. Before you call an API operation as a RAM user, you must create and attach the required RAM policy to the RAM user.

For more information, see Mapping of IoT Platform operations and RAM policies.