SurveyMonkey: testing api via console

Question

I am trying to access a partner survey using the api. So before getting started with the client implementation, I am testing the api using the console.

After setting the auth code and the request parameters, I get this response:

{
    "Content-Type": "text/xml",
    "Date": "Sun, 11 Aug 2013 17:43:18 GMT",
    "Server": "Mashery Proxy",
    "X-Mashery-Error-Code": "ERR_403_DEVELOPER_INACTIVE",
    "X-Mashery-Message-Id": "2040f2f4-6a3b-45fe-80be-81c848e42422",
    "X-Mashery-Responder": "prod-j-worker-us-west-1b-19.mashery.com",
    "Content-Length": "27",
    "Connection": "keep-alive"
}

What does it mean? Should any kind of config set up by the partner? Or does the SurveyMonkey console not enable to access production environment?

Answer 1

SurveyMonkey's developer API stuff is provided by Mashery. If you take a look at the docs you will see a status code listing at the bottom of the page you will see what the various types of 403 errors.

Your code shows this: "X-Mashery-Error-Code": "ERR_403_DEVELOPER_INACTIVE" and based on Mashery's docs i'd probably contact them directly and try to find out why the API key you are using to access the Mashery API is not approved.

My hunch is that the problem is probably not with SurveyMonkey directly.

Answer 2

I have seen this error a couple of times. Here are the reasons why you might get that error:

1. You are not providing the api_key url parameter
2. You are incorrectly spelling 'api_key' as 'apikey'
3. Your key is actually not enabled. You can check here: https://developer.surveymonkey.com/apps/mykeys

In general https://developer.surveymonkey.com/io-docs is a production console however it has a couple gotchas that i think SurveyMonkey is working on fixing.

Answer 3

Your developer account can be inactive due to requesting too many keys. You can check your status here. In my own experience, if I deleted a key and added another, the new key was inactive for some time.

Please note that SM only allows JSON as the output format of the API (source). From the API Console the field Content-Type should be filled in with "application/json". I don't think "text/xml" will work with the API now.