TFS (2015) REST Services - rest

Question

I have been asked by a developer (Cold Fusion) to expose the REST API so they can programatically create Work Items from a in house developed application.
This is my first foray into REST within TFS and I am not to sure where to start. I checked the Microsoft documentation but it is of course biased towards .NET or client libraries, but as far as I can make out I wont be able to do anything with these as it is cold fusion environment making the "call" ?
Can I get some advice as to how I go about achieving this?

Answer 1

Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are service endpoints that support sets of HTTP operations (methods), which provide create, retrieve, update, or delete access to the service's resources.
The Api to create a work item is as below:
POST https://{accountName}.visualstudio.com/{project}/_apis/wit/workitems/${type}?api-version=4.1
[
{
"op": "add",
"path": "/fields/System.Title",
"from": null,
"value": "Sample task"
}
]
If you just want to test the rest api, you could download Postman, and test api using it. If you want to use the rest api in the code, you could refer to the example below.
Here is an example getting a list of projects for your account:
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
...
//encode your personal access token
string credentials = Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes(string.Format("{0}:{1}", "", personalAccessToken)));
ListofProjectsResponse.Projects viewModel = null;
//use the httpclient
using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://{accountname}.visualstudio.com"); //url of our account
client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Clear();
client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/json"));
client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic", credentials);
//connect to the REST endpoint
HttpResponseMessage response = client.GetAsync("_apis/projects?stateFilter=All&api-version=1.0").Result;
//check to see if we have a succesfull respond
if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
{
//set the viewmodel from the content in the response
viewModel = response.Content.ReadAsAsync<ListofProjectsResponse.Projects>().Result;
//var value = response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
}
}
Useful links:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/vsts/?view=vsts-rest-4.1
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/vsts/wit/work%20items/create?view=vsts-rest-4.1