Tendrl

Docs / Contact / resources/data-export-and-bulk-registration

Data Export & Bulk Registration

Two dashboard tools for working with your account in bulk: exporting your message and audit history to a file, and registering many devices in a single step. Both are also plain HTTP endpoints if you'd rather script them.

Exporting data

Every list view that has an Export CSV button downloads exactly what you're looking at: the same rows, in the same order, honouring the same filters. Large result sets are streamed: Contact writes rows to the download as it reads them from the database, in pages of 1,000, so an account with a year of history never has to buffer the whole export in memory (and you start getting bytes right away).

Two things are exportable today: messages and the audit log.

Messages

From the Messages page, click Export CSV. The file mirrors the message list (one row per publish message, newest first) with these columns:

Column Meaning
id Message ID
source Sender resource path
destination Recipient resource path
msgType Always publish for exports
data The message payload
tags Context tags
timestamp When it was published

The endpoint is:

code

GET https://app.tendrl.com/api/messages/export

Query parameters:

Audit log

From the Audit Log page, click Export CSV. The export carries whatever resourceType and action filters you have set on the page, newest first, with these columns:

Column Meaning
id Audit entry ID
action What happened (e.g. create, delete, export)
resourceType The kind of resource acted on
resourceId The resource's ID
resourceName The resource's name
userEmail Who did it
timestamp When
details Extra context, as JSON

The endpoint is:

code

GET https://app.tendrl.com/api/audit-log/export

Query parameters:

Audit-log export is plan-gated

Like the audit log itself, exporting it requires the Standard plan or higher (Standard, Pro, or a manually-billed/enterprise account). On Free and Starter the endpoint returns 403 with code plan_required. See Data Retention for how long audit history is kept.

Exporting the audit log is itself an audited event: it writes an entry with action export on resource type audit_log, so an export always shows up in the next audit-log view.

CSV vs JSON

Add ?format=json to any export endpoint to stream a JSON array instead of CSV. CSV starts with a header row; JSON streams one object per record inside a [ … ] array. Both arrive as a file download (Content-Disposition: attachment).

Bulk device registration

Registering devices one at a time is fine for a handful, but tedious for a whole fleet. The Bulk register button on the Entities page creates many devices in a single request, each with its own API key.

Two ways to specify devices

The Register devices in bulk dialog, showing the count-plus-prefix mode The dialog previews the names it will create before you commit.

Count + prefix: generate sequentially named devices. A count of 5 with the prefix sensor creates sensor-1 through sensor-5. Any tags (and metadata, via the API) you supply are applied to all of them.

Paste names: give an explicit list of names, one per line or comma-separated. Use this when your devices already have meaningful names that don't follow a pattern.

If a directory is selected on the Entities page when you open the dialog, the new devices are placed into that directory.

The endpoint

code

POST https://app.tendrl.com/api/entities/bulk

Count + prefix:

json

{
  "count": 5,
  "prefix": "sensor",
  "tags": ["floor-2", "hvac"],
  "metadata": { "site": "warehouse-a" },
  "directoryId": "optional-directory-id"
}

Explicit list (takes precedence if both are supplied):

json

{
  "entities": [
    { "name": "lobby-cam", "tags": ["camera"] },
    { "name": "dock-cam",  "tags": ["camera"] }
  ]
}

Limits

Keys are shown once

The response returns a per-device result, including the device's API key token, and that token is shown only this one time. Contact stores a hashed key it can verify against, never the plaintext, so there is no way to retrieve the token later.

In the dashboard the results table appears with a reminder to save the keys, and a Download keys (CSV) button writes a device-keys.csv file with columns name, apiKeyId, apiKey, resourcePath, status. Download it before closing the dialog. If you lose a key, delete that device's key and issue a new one from API Keys rather than trying to recover the old value.

Each result reports a status of created or failed (with a detail reason), so a single bad name in a batch doesn't sink the rest. The response also includes a created count and each created device's resourcePath and apiKeyId.

One audit entry per batch

A bulk registration writes a single audit-log entry, not one entry per device: action bulk_create on resource type entity, with details recording how many devices were requested and how many were created.

← Back to Contact docs