Content Distribution Service (CDS) FAQ

Below are common questions collected from Station Q&A sessions, Slack messages and emails sent to the teams that support CDS.

Authentication and Access to CDS

How do I get a CDS API Key and how soon can I expect turnaround to be?

You can get an API key by contacting Member Partnership at NPR. Expect around a business week for full turnaround. You will be issued two keys per platform that plan to use CDS in:

  • One for our CDS staging environment in case you want to test out your application that uses CDS prior to production
  • One for our CDS production environment. NOTE: Only use this environment if you’re expecting the world to see your content!

Is there an expiration date for CDS API Keys?

There is no expiration date for your key. However, NPR retains the right to terminate a key after contacting you if there is a violation of our CDS API Terms of use.

Something is wrong with my key

First, before contacting Member Partnership, be sure that you have the right key and the right domain for the environment you are targeting. There are two active environments that we’ll distribute keys for:

  • Stage - https://stage-content.api.npr.org
  • Prod - https://content.api.npr.org

If you have a stage key then all calls made to CDS should be using the stage-content.api.npr.org domain. For prod keys you use content.api.npr.org.

When setting your owners and brandings array, you need to also use the stage domain for organization API:

  • Stage - https://stage-organization.api.npr.org
  • Prod - https://organization.api.npr.org

Fields, Content Types and Usage

What types of collections are going to be supported in the CDS?

The same aggregations that exist in the Story API today are available in the CDS API as well. That is because the CDS API today gets copies of the same data that Story API ingests - both systems are working in parallel.

CDS supports:

A note on “Seamus” document IDs versus modern CDS prefixed document IDs

The catch about the above statement is that you can not re-create or publish anew any Seamus-ID document. These documents have IDs that are numerical e.g. 12345 and do not have a document ID prefix. Only our NPR-internal Seamus tool was granted this ability. If you delete a document previously published by Seamus and want to republish it again, you must do so following the rules around prefixes. See the publishing guide for more.

I’m on the stage CDS environment and noticing that there’s documents missing - is there something wrong?

No, nothing wrong. Our stage CDS environment only gets updated with production data every Sunday. In addition, stage has test data that is part of our regular integration testing. So be aware that this is not a real isolated environment.

I’m getting an error when trying to publish that references a regex and my document ID - what is wrong?

Recall from Getting Started that document IDs are required to be prefixed by your own document ID prefix (e.g. abc-*) AND you need to have all lowercase alphanumeric characters.

Hosting content in CDS

Will my images, audio and other assets get “re-hosted” at NPR HQ when I send the data to CDS?

No. We will take your URLs as they come through in the various documents you send CDS and simply save that JSON to our CDS backend. Then clients will receive your documents as-is. There is not any redirecting, uploading or re-hosting of your content. Exceptions would be if, on your CMS/client end, you either use an NPR hosted URL for an asset OR you upload your content to NPR’s CDNs and then use that URL.

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