Is there a Magento API reference?

Question

Is there an API reference or documentation for Magento that I can refer to find out the methods available in the different Mage classes?

Let's say I want to find out more about the method getBeforeAuthUrl(). Other than digging into the actual implementation, is there a documentation where I can find out where this method is available, what are its parameters, what does its boolean argument do, etc? How can I find out what other methods I can use in a certain Mage class?

I've been searching everywhere but I can't find one. I'm not sure if I'm missing out something, but digging into the Magento code just to find out what methods I can use and how I can use those methods is quite a pain for a beginner to learn, especially when Magento is massive.

Answer 1

Here is the devdocs for Magento 2:

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/

For Magento 1.x, as far as I know, you're stuck using generated docs which can be found throughout the web such as:

http://doc-magento.com/nav.html?_functions/index.html

As to your specific question, there's a reason you get nothing when you Google that method. Review the Varien_Object class, specifically the getDataUsingMethod() function. The method you requested doc on is simply a magic getter method and holds data set in the other Session classes. Case in point why most devs don't like magic methods.

Answer 2

I think best place is Magento DevDocs. You can refer about Magento 1.x SOAP API from http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/m1x/api/soap/introduction.html and about Magento 1.x REST API from http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/m1x/api/rest/introduction.html

For instance the above documents summarizes the API functions as below. (Please note that this is a portion in the document. You can refer full article by above links).

Other than these official documents, there a detailed article done by INCHOOERS :) http://inchoo.net/magento/magento-v2-soap-demystified/

Hope you can get some basic idea by going through these resources.