Adding deleted contact through API

[YosvaniA]

Hi,

If i deleted a contact and i want to add the same contact again API responses with contact already exists but it is deleted. Is there any way to add deleted contact using API?

[Jimmy_D · Accepted solution]

Hello @YosvaniA,

Thank you for reaching out to Constant Contact's API Support.

Our system does a soft delete of contacts which means the email address still technically exists in the account. In order to use it again instead of creating that contact with a POST you would update it with a PUT.

If you are using our v2 API then you would use this endpoint.

https://developer.constantcontact.com/docs/contacts-api/contacts-resource.html?method=PUT

[AlexM760]

The updating portion makes sense but how would you be able to Search a "sort-deleted" user by email?

I currently have a system where the user searches by email address so they can update lists and contact information. A soft-deleted user comes back from the API as a 200 but with empty contact body. The following was via 'contacts' GET passing in the `email_address` parameter in the v3 API.

[body] => {
	"contacts" : []
}
[response] => Array
(
	[code] => 200
	[message] => OK
)

Is there a different method to retrieve a "soft-deleted" contact via the API so that they can be updated via PUT?