Guides

These guides walk through building a pet health product on TheDogAPI: an app where each owner has a profile for their dog, checks in on its health over time, and gets content that fits its breed and life stage. Each guide stands on its own, so read the ones you need.

Set up

• Staging and production accounts: where to build and test without touching live data.
• Create a pet: the record most other guides start from, with or without photos.
• Upload a pet video: formats, file types and processing.
• Link pets to your users: sub_id and external_owner_id, and what not to send us.
• Choose what's switched on: see every capability on your account and switch off the ones you don't want.
• Webhooks: get results pushed to you, and verify they came from us.

Profile

• Identify a breed from a photo
• Estimate age and life stage
• Breed data for owner content: characteristics, facts, health tips and exercise by life stage.
• Pet portraits
• Health tips for a pet: breed tips plus tips written for this pet.
• Submit photos to the public library: share users' photos, with review.

Health checks

• Body condition score with vet review
• Resting respiratory rate (early access)
• A pet's health history: record vet visits and measurements over time.

Feeding and weight

• Daily calories: a calorie range for one pet, with portions in its own food.
• Weight-loss plan: step down one body condition band at a time, with recheck dates and vet referrals.
• Track weight and exercise: record what the calculators need, and build a history as you go.
• Estimate weight from photos: a starting weight when there's no scale reading.

What's next

• Roadmap and design partners: muscle condition, dental, gait and capillary refill.

Something going wrong? Errors and limits explains every status code and how to retry.