Unfortunately that was the answer to this question a year ago.   Your API needs to be more agile for such a simplistic task.   Its not like someone is asking you to create a brand new functionality.   Your GUI allows things to be named "Phone"  "street" "CustomerNumber" but the API forces you to use absurd generic naming conventions.   That means the end user has to have a cheat sheet to convert CustomFieldNN to "Street" address when using the custom fields in the body of their email.   The fact that this functionality was promised a year ago, and is being promised again, translates into it is not a priority for Constant Contact API developers and hence we'll be having this discussion in a year.   Or I'll be using a different product.   One of the two.     ... View more

Its been a year.   Has this been fixed yet?   ... View more

Hey Brad,   I wrote a php script to use with Chronoforms which is a Joomla component.  On the website side of the fence I am going to capture the data provided by the end user.  I am making a postal address required to submit that form.   In between the submit key press and interacting with you I take their postal address and geolocate their lat/long coordinates.  Using a second data source I convert the lat/long into a elected official senate and representative district. This takes place in a few fractions of a second and then I do an API call to insert all of the fields into a contact in CC.   I am attempting to insert six fields with each record without issue.  I have a test php script that pushes these values into the record without issue: house district, rep name, rep phone, senate district, senate name, senate phone   However, they import as the generic names "Custom Field 1" etc.  When I generate a template and try to populate the form with the custom field in the body of the message and email it to the person who has those six fields associated with their entry the email shows up empty / blank.   Andrew Vazquez in support says this: --- Unfortunately, the solution to the situation is going to be a relatively labor-intensive process. What happens is that earlier on we experienced an issue where custom fields labeled anything other than Custom Field 1, Custom Field 2, etc., would not function correctly within the system. Custom names for custom fields would not render appropriately. We've since corrected that issue and thereby created the exact opposite situation: any custom field that has the default name will not render correctly.  You will have to export your data and delete your custom field names from the My settings portion of your account. You will then have to re-import the data with custom fields that are NOT labeled the defaults. You will only have to do this one time. After this, your custom fields will work correctly.  ---    ^ Even if this works I have a sneaking suspicion that the next time my API calls fire they're just going to create new fields named Custom Field 1, 2, 3, etc.  Regardless - I've tried to export the one user I built via the API, rename the fields with english in the .csv, delete all of the custom fields as instructed, and then re-import that CSV.  That re-import fails and crashes with the CSV I just downloaded from the CC website minutes earlier with no descriptive information other than "someone has been notified".  So I've tried to go into the custom fields and just "rename" each field, send a new test email to the one user who has these fields populated and those emails continue to show up blank in the custom area.   I've created new email templates from scratch, I've deleted/re-added over and over again.  I just can't make this work and I'm pulling my hair out.   All I want to do is be able to use the API to populate the custom fields and be able to generate a template that occasionally includes that end-user specific information about the recipient's elected official contact information in the email.  This really shouldn't be this complicated to pull off but I've hit a dead end. ... View more

This solved my problem but I am beyond frustrated with the interface.   I've had the account for almost a month now and all I've done is play with the API for the sake of automating population of a list and trying to get custom fields to work when I send an email out to recipients.   The custom fields are populating with my test script in a single test user, but of course they are naming themselves "Custom Field 1" through 6.   According to support the reason my emails (to this one test user) are showing up with blank data for the custom fields is because I can't name my custom fields Custom Field 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 -- I have to use names and the solution is to delete all of my custom fields because they introduced a bug by trying to fix the naming of the fields?   what?!?!  So their recommendation? 1. Backup my contacts 2. Delete my custom fields 3. Reimport the backup So I've tried this.  About 10 times.  Every time I try to import the CSV file I get this: "We're sorry, but something went wrong.   We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly" So basically the entire custom field system is broken, you have to jump through hoops to work around known bugs introduced by the designers just to make it work, those hoops don't even work because you can't upload a CSV file to the webpage, and when you call technical support and ask them to assist they say "oh yeah, we have a defect with the custom fields.  We know."   Is this really how Constant Contact operates?  Because I've just about lost all patience with the product and I have not sent one single real email to any subscribers.   ... View more