Capabilities

Capabilities are features or permissions associated with a user's account, and are often tied to a user's Canva plan. Capabilities are used to control access to premium Canva functionality, and to help integrations expose features in a responsive and user-friendly way.

For example, the resize API requires the resize capability. If a user doesn't have the capability, any request on behalf of the user to that API fails with an error response. An integration can pre-check whether or not a user has the resize capability before making a request to the resize API.

Not all APIs require a capability. If an API requires a capability, it's listed in the reference documentation for the API operation, as well as in its OpenAPI specification, under the x-required-capabilities property.

Before making a request to an API that requires a capability, integrations should use the Get user capabilities API to check whether a user has a required capability.

After checking a user's capabilities, integrations can make informed decisions on the user experience, such as:

• Showing or hiding UI elements
• Informing the user that a feature is unavailable
• Avoiding unnecessary API calls that would result in errors

If an integration attempts to access an API on behalf of a user that doesn't have a required capability, the API returns a 403 Forbidden error with a descriptive error message indicating the required capabilities. For example:

Not allowed to access getResizeJob, requires one of capabilities ["resize"]