# Tutorials overview

These tutorials use Tilia APIs and UI widgets to demonstrate Tilia services in common use cases.
After completing these tutorials, you will understand how to add Tilia services to
your application.

Usage note
You must run all of the **User account tutorials** at least one time before you run the tutorials in other sections.
These tutorials prepare the environment used by all the other tutorials as they demonstrate user account related functions.

After you've run the **User account tutorials** once, the order you run the tutorials is not restricted.
If a request requires data that has not yet been configured, it
displays an error message in the Postman console log.

## Overview

The tutorials are built around a few users who interact in scenarios that
are described in the tutorials and modeled in [the Postman collections and requests](https://www.postman.com/tilia-docs-testing/workspace/get-started-using-tilia-services/overview).
The users that you meet in these tutorials and the environment variables that define them are described
in the following table:

| User role | Description | Environment variables |
|  --- | --- | --- |
| **payer** | Makes purchases | `payers_username``payers_email` |
| **recipient** | Receives payments | `recipients_username``recipients_email` |
| **creator** | Creates goods that others sell | `creators_username``creators_email` |


The users' names help you identify their role in an interaction.
Not every interaction involves every user role.
When you use Tilia services in your application, one person, or user account,
can generally take on any of these user roles.

After you create the user accounts, you can use them to explore interactions with Tilia services.

User accounts are never destroyed.
If you can reuse them, that can make it easier to come back to these collections to experiment and learn further.

The tutorials are divided into these sections to help you find the tutorial that best
fits your interest.

- **User account tutorials** demonstrate aspects of the user accounts used by
Tilia services and prepare the user accounts that participate in the tutorial examples.
- **Transaction tutorials** demonstrate different types of transactions that can be
accomplished by Tilia's services.


## Before you start

The first task in your learning journey is to request developer credentials from Tilia.
With these credentials, you can interact with Tilia services in our sandbox to practice using
them as you would in your application.

[Contact us for your Tilia developer credentials](https://www.tilia.io/contact-sales)

To be successful with these tutorials, you should have an understanding of the application into
which you want to add Tilia services.
You should also know how to integrate external services that are accessed by REST APIs
into your application.

Because each publisher applies these services differently to support their unique application,
the API interactions in these tutorials are presented generically as a series of REST requests in
[Postman](https://www.postman.com/) with minimal JavaScript to facilitate the examples.
The Postman requests show the context, the data they require, the sequence in which they are called,
and the properties and parameters that are passed between the requests.
After you complete a tutorial, you can continue experimenting by duplicating and modifying the
examples in the Postman collections.
Tilia also provides an [IOS SDK](/sdks/ios-sdk/) and a [Unity SDK](/sdks/unity-sdk/)
to help you integrate Tilia services into those applications.

After completing these tutorials, you should have a clear idea of how Tilia services can
help your application and how to incorporate those services into your application.

## Who's who in the tutorials

In addition to the user roles described earlier, the tutorials refer to other entities
that you might recognize under different names.
This table describes the entities to which the tutorials refer to help you know who's who.

| Entity in these tutorials | Description |
|  --- | --- |
| **application** | The system, program, platform, or application to which you'd like to add Tilia services |
| **integrator** | The organization, developer, publisher who is adding Tilia services to the application, often the same as the *publisher* |
| **publisher** | The entity that makes the application available for users to use |
| **Tilia** | Tilia and the services they provide |
| **user** | The end user of your application |


[Get started with the tutorials](/tutorials/tutorial_get_started)

## The *express lane* through the tutorials

The tutorials demonstrate how the different API operations work together to serve a customer use case.
They also include information that can help you adapt the examples to your application.

*However...*

If you’re in a hurry, and you have your Tilia developer credentials,
you can skip the documentation and run the requests in
[the Postman collections](https://www.postman.com/tilia-docs-testing/workspace/get-started-using-tilia-services/overview).
If you have any questions while doing this, you can always come back to the tutorials and
review the [developer guides](/guides/) for more information.

**To take the *express lane* through the tutorial examples:**

1. Open or create your [Postman](https://www.postman.com/) account.
2. In your Postman account, create a new workspace named `Tilia tutorial workspace`
for your forked copies of the environment and collections.
3. Open the [Get started using Tilia Services](https://www.postman.com/tilia-docs-testing/workspace/get-started-using-tilia-services/overview)
public workspace and:
  1. Fork each collection to your **Tilia tutorial workspace**. Check **Watch original collection**
to be notified of changes to the public collections so you can update the
collections in your workspace.
  2. Fork the **Tilia Client Info** environment to your **Tilia tutorial workspace**.
  3. Continue in the **Tilia tutorial workspace** that you forked the collections into.
4. In the **Tilia Client Info** environment:
  1. Enter your Tilia developer credentials.
  2. Enter usernames and email addresses for your user roles.
5. Run each collection. Note that you must run the requests in the **_Manage user accounts** collection first.
The **_Manage user accounts** collection initializes the values used by the other collections in the shared workspace.
After that, you can run the requests in the collections in the order that interests you.
If a request is missing some required data, it displays an error to the browser's console log.
  1. Review the Collection's **Overview** tab.
  2. In the Collection's **Overview** tab, take special note: of the **Get started** section:
  3. Some collections have request names that end with **(UI)**.
These requests require that you use the [Tilia UI Sandbox](/web-uis/ui-sandbox-guide/)
in a separate browser window to continue.
These requests do not make any API calls, rather, the instructions for what to enter in the
UI Sandbox are found in the **Tests** tab of those requests.
The following screenshot shows an example of such a request.
![UI instructions in Tests tab of Postman request](/assets/tutorial-overview-ui-steps.7edb9de1971ad32ce0fdeae7b19258b1842e507c73f84a79a221d61a30d10813.9c1bb791.png)
6. For more information about the Postman collections and the individual requests,
open the context menu of the request and choose **View documentation**.
This is an example of the context menu.
![Context menu of a Postman request](/assets/tutorial-overview-context-menu.5047b83e9a90a4e5e28e7b10ad37e063b3e0e408af207df9681f82df47fe9dd1.9c1bb791.png)
– or –
In the Collection’s **Overview** tab:
  1. Scroll to the bottom
  2. Open the **View complete documentation** link to review the documentation for all the requests in the collection.
  3. Scroll to find the request you’re interested in.


If you encounter any problems with the Postman examples, refer to their
corresponding tutorials for more information.