COMPOSITION OF A CALL

To explain the composition of a call, we will use the time-series dataset Federal Reserve Economic Dataset as an example. See product page at https://data.nasdaq.com/data/FRED - this URL contains the product code for this dataset, which is FRED. On the product page, you will see that this product is made up of many individual time-series datasets, each one with their own code eg. the time-series for Natural Rate of Unemployment (Short-Term) has code FRED/NROUST, the time-series for Real Potential Gross Domestic Product has code FRED/GDPPOT and so on. These are the codes we will use in API calls.

The following call retrieves the first year of monthly settle prices for FRED GDP time-series data (FRED/GDP), which you can find on Nasdaq Data Link here, in CSV format:

curl "https://data.nasdaq.com/api/v3/datasets/FRED/GDP.csv?collapse=annual&rows=6&order=asc&column_index=1&api_key=YOURAPIKEY"

We can break down this request as follows:

URL COMPONENT	EXPLANATION
`https://data.nasdaq.com/api/v3/datasets/FRED/GDP.csv`	This portion of the call queries the `FRED/GDP` time-series and returns the data in CSV format.
`collapse=annual`	Converts the series to annual.
`rows=6`	This truncates the results to include only the first six rows of data.
`order=asc`	This arranges the dates in ascending order.
`column_index=1`	This parameter allows users to define just a single column to return, in this case column 1 (Value).
`api_key=YOURAPIKEY`	This part of the call authenticates you as a Nasdaq Data Link user. Replace the placeholder text `<YOURAPIKEY>` with your personal API Key.

The following is the output for our example call:

DATE,VALUE
1947-12-31,260.3
1948-12-31,280.7
1949-12-31,271
1950-12-31,320.3
1951-12-31,356.6
1952-12-31,381.2

For a complete list of time-series parameters, click here.