Single File Scan

The most common way to use the API is by uploading a single file for a plagiarism scan and receiving the results. This page will describe the scan flow, step-by-step.
See below the flow diagram:

Analyzing Steps

The first task is to get the Copyleaks authentication token. You will need to add this token later on to your API requests in order to verify your identity. This task is being done through the Login method. Once you have this token, you are ready to continue forward to the next step.

Now, when you are able to authenticate yourself to the Copyleaks servers, using the token you received from the Login method, you are ready to submit the file for a scan. You can do so by calling one of the 'Submit' methods: file , url and ocr (image converted to text). Besides adding the scanned content to your ‘Submit’ request, you are able to add scan properties. For more details, check out the documentation page.

After submitting the content for a scan, you will need to wait for the scan completion event. Once triggered, Copyleaks server will send webhooks to your server (Read more about Copyleaks Asynchronous Model .

At this point when the scan is completed, you will receive one of the two webhooks:

• error – the scan was completed with an error.
• completed – the scan was completed successfully.

If your scan completed with an error, fix the issue according to the error message you received and try submitting the content for another scan.

If the scan completed successfully, your scan results will be sent to your completed-webhook . All the information provided is metadata about the results. On top of that, you can download more information about the scan with the Downloads methods (get the result text, exact found matches, etc.).

We recommend to store the information on your own servers. When you are done with downloading the data to your servers, you can call the Delete method to remove the scan from the Copyleaks servers.