About _Mystic_Chorale

Hi Jimmy:   Thank you for your detailed reply. I spent some more time reviewing the documentation and have a few more follow up questions. Please get back to me on these when you have a chance.   1. What attracted me to the endpoint I mentioned was that it allows you to either add the contact if it doesn't exist or update the contact if it does exist in a single call. From the documentation I read on the other end point for adding a contact it returns a 409 error if the contact exists, then you have to make a second call to update the contact.   The one potential conflict I thought of was related to the requirement that at least one list ID be specified. We could easily create a dummy list in our account to add contacts to. However if the contact is an existing contact can I specify to add them to this list without overriding any other lists the contact already belongs to? Hope that makes sense!   2. Is there any specific reason why we can't continue to create a new email list for each season and add/remove contacts from this list via the API as needed? I would still like to reserve this method as an option if my solution for using segments (see question 3 below) is not viable.   3. I reviewed the documentation concerning segments and outlined a potential solution for managing our season lists with this feature. I wanted to run this outline by you to make sure this would be a viable solution before attempting to implement it:   Use the custom fields option within our Constant Contact account to create a custom field for contacts for active season. This active season custom field would have as the value the season the singer is registering for (Winter 2021 etc). When the singer registers use the API to update the contact setting the active season custom field to the season being registered for. In our Constant Contact account create a segment which would send emails to contacts with the active season value for the singers for a specific season. For example we could create a segment to send an email to everyone with the active season of Winter 2021. Hope that makes sense! What I was confused about is whether segments can be created within the admin for our account. I would prefer to avoid trying to manage the segments themselves through the API, it would be easier if I can do something like what I outlined above where a custom field is used to identify singers by season.   Thanks again for your help!   -Robert ... View more

Hi Jimmy:   Thanks for getting back to me. Sounds good, I will have a go at setting up our integration with the V3 API. Before I start working on this I have a few follow up questions: one general question concerning interacting with the API and a few questions specific to our integration.   For the general question I just wanted to confirm how data is sent and received from the V3 API using PHP. Instead of using a wrapper library (like the PHP SDK used with the V2 API) communicating with the V3 API uses JSON/Curl functions in PHP to send and receive the data. Data is formatted as JSON then sent to the API using Curl functions to the relevant endpoint, and vice-versa where data is received via Curl functions as JSON and decoded in PHP. Is this a correct outline of the general connection process or is there a different method I should be using to send/receive data from the V3 API?   For the next set of questions I just wanted to briefly outline how our integration works and confirm that it will be possible to work with our mailing lists through the V3 API in the following scenarios. Without going into too much detail singers register to sing for a season with our choral group, as part of the registration they are added to one or more mailing lists in our Constant Contact account specific to each season. Here are the basic steps involved:   Retrieve all mailing lists from our CC account via the API. Get the list ID numbers of the lists associated with the current season by matching the data returned by the API with the lists specified in our local database. Via the API check to see if a contact already exists in our CC account for the email address provided by the singer who is signing up. If a contact doesn't exist add the signer as a new contact (first name, last name, email address). Add the singer to the respective mailing lists for the season (from step 1 above). This process also needs to run in reverse where singers can use a form on our website to drop out of a season. In this case they are removed from the respective season mailing lists, however they are left as a contact in our CC account.   A third situation occurs when the user changes their email address in our local database. In this case the singer needs their old email address removed from the respective season lists, and added to the lists under their new email address. Ideally the existing contact would be updated with the new email address in CC (rather than creating a new contact).   Three more general questions:   We only need to pass first name, last name, and email address when creating new contacts via the API. Are there any other properties that need to be set when creating contacts dynamically via the API ? Just want to make sure there aren't any status issues since the user is not directly interacting with Constant Contact like they would be using a simple sign up form. In reviewing the documentation I noticed that in the formatting of the JSON object for a contact the mailing list information (which mailing lists the user belongs to) is nested on the second level within another property. Should I be passing these as a nested/multi-dimensional array in PHP when converting to a JSON object for sending to the API? In reviewing the documentation for the V3 API the basic example involves uploading contacts from a CSV file which is not relevant to our integration which I outlined above. Is there any other sample code I can look at that more closely matches what I outlined for our integration above? In particular I am concerned that our integration is done entirely programmatically with no clicking/interaction by the user, just want to make sure there aren't any issues I could be missing in this regard. Hope all of the above makes sense, please get back to me when you have a chance. I am hoping to work on this on Friday night, if you have time to get back to me later today or during the day on Friday that would be great. Thanks again for your help!   -Robert ... View more

Hello: I wanted to follow up again on this issue, sorry I have not had a chance to respond again to this earlier. I'm am still having the same issue. I can successfully run the function I set up when calling it directly from a page in Word Press, however when I attempt to call the function when the registration form is submitted in Word Press I get the Bad Request error.   Any ideas on how to resolve this? I'm stumped at this point.   Thanks again for your help and please get back to me when you have a chance! ... View more

Hi Jimmy:   Thank you very much for your reply and for looking into my question. When your PHP expert is back in the office please have them post here about the proper placing of the autoloader and use statements. I will also spend some more time troubleshooting this issue and will post here if I am able to come up with a good solution.   Thanks again for your help, much appreciated! ... View more

Some additional information to clarify the wordy explanation I gave of the issue above. The function I set up to integrate with Constant Contact through the API is being called from two actions: the user_register action and the profile update action. Where do I place the code for the autoloaders (require_once) and the use statements for the classes so that they will be available when one of the two actions is triggered?   Hope that makes more sense! ... View more