TL;DR: akapi-fetch.js is an open-source JavaScript library that makes it easy to call the ActionKit API from within an admin dashboard report. The code is available from this website and from GitHub.
Interactive Dashboards with the AK API
ActionKit provides a rich API that allows organizations to build custom functionality on top of the platform, including rich user interactions, back-end automation, and integrations with third-party services — but some groups have been stymied by a lack of staff fluent in server-side development and programming languages traditionally used to call that API.
The good news is that many of those organizations do have technically-savvy front-end developers who know how to build dynamic websites… and it turns out that’s enough to create a wide range of custom tools on top of the ActionKit API. Because these tools run in a web browser, they don’t require a separate server — instead, we can just use ActionKit’s “Dashboard” feature to paste the HTML and JavaScript code into a custom screen in the ActionKit admin web interface.
In addition to customized reporting, these tools can also extend the ActionKit admin interface to better support an organization’s workflow. And because those dashboards are running inside the ActionKit admin, they’re automatically tied into ActionKit’s authentication system for staff accounts — anyone who can log in to your organization’s instance can access these tools without dealing with new account or passwords, and users with limited permissions can’t access information they’re not supposed to.
Getting Started
Read the akapi-fetch.js documentation to see how you can invoke the AK API from within your own dashboards.