How to make Open better

conviojames

Please tell us how we can make Open better. No subject is off limits. Tell us about the APIs, the program surrounding the APIs, the documentation, you name it! Point us to API programs you like better than ours and tell us what you like about them. Together, we can make Open even better than it is.

Ryan Hagg

1. More information in error messages

2. Better error handling. Account for all cases, not just most common. Like if you try to add a constituent and they have a duplicate record.

3. Better documentation, including when new features are released or bugs fixed

4. Multi center XML tags

5. Recurring donation API

6. Constituent management API

7. Event registration API (might be available in some capacity, but it needs to be more robust)

8. Import API

9. Duplicate resolution API

10. Reporting API to show real time stats to stakeholders that care about an email's open rate, click throughs, etc.

11. An API to send an email as a one off. Someone makes a pledge through our student calling program, we can use some process to create a mail merge and then a Convio API to send it.

That's just the first few I could think of. Basically, I would love to see every part of the Convio product as an API, but that's just because I have the resources available to tinker with them and get them to work

Message was edited by: Ryan Hagg

Colin McClure

Ryan Hagg:

1. More information in error messages

2. Better error handling. Account for all cases, not just most common. Like if you try to add a constituent and they have a duplicate record.

3. Better documentation, including when new features are released or bugs fixed

4. Multi center XML tags

5. Recurring donation API

6. Constituent management API

7. Event registration API (might be available in some capacity, but it needs to be more robust)

8. Import API

9. Duplicate resolution API

10. Reporting API to show real time stats to stakeholders that care about an email's open rate, click throughs, etc.

11. An API to send an email as a one off. Someone makes a pledge through our student calling program, we can use some process to create a mail merge and then a Convio API to send it.

That's just the first few I could think of. Basically, I would love to see every part of the Convio product as an API, but that's just because I have the resources available to tinker with them and get them to work

Message was edited by: Ryan Hagg

I agree with everything Ryan mentioned, plus an Interest management API. The subscription managment in Convio is sorely lacking with MultiCenter. If we had the API to build our own we would.

Ryan Means

I've seen some REST based API's add a UUID as a required attribute on every request - this would prevent the same request from hitting convio more than once. This would be especially great to have on the donation client side API, as it would by default, prevent a user from hitting submit more than once and donating multiple times. It works since the multiple requests made by the client (or possibly a network glitch) would hit convio with the same UUID, only the first request with that UUID would be accepted by convio, the rest of them with the same UUID are thrown out.

It's the developers responsibility to then put the UUID's on all their requests. Maybe this would be a good version "1.1" or "2" tag on the v tag. The UUID can be anything numeric or numeral as long as it is universally unique to that developers API key / called method on each request.

mark.ajws

Ryan Hagg:

1. More information in error messages

2. Better error handling. Account for all cases, not just most common. Like if you try to add a constituent and they have a duplicate record.

3. Better documentation, including when new features are released or bugs fixed

4. Multi center XML tags

5. Recurring donation API

6. Constituent management API

7. Event registration API (might be available in some capacity, but it needs to be more robust)

8. Import API

9. Duplicate resolution API

10. Reporting API to show real time stats to stakeholders that care about an email's open rate, click throughs, etc.

11. An API to send an email as a one off. Someone makes a pledge through our student calling program, we can use some process to create a mail merge and then a Convio API to send it.

That's just the first few I could think of. Basically, I would love to see every part of the Convio product as an API, but that's just because I have the resources available to tinker with them and get them to work

Message was edited by: Ryan Hagg

I would add to the list:

• The ability to write the Donate API to custom form fields
• Advocacy API
• Documentation, Documentation, Documentation

David Hart

mark.ajws :

I would add to the list:

• The ability to write the Donate API to custom form fields
• Advocacy API
• Documentation, Documentation, Documentation

I can't argue about the documentation. We just hired someone to help.

You can pass custom fields via the Donation API:

The custom fields have to be defined on the donation form that is backing the API. When you do that, you can say that the custom field should be stored just with the donation or on both the donation and the constituent.

The name of the input element from the API is derived from the "Data Element Name" that you provide when you create the custom field for the donation form. That name is converted into something that is valid for a database column name by converting all letters to lower case and replacing all spaces with "_". So a Data Element Name of "My Custom String" should be passed into the donation API as "my_custom_string". Note that the "Data Element Name" is the same across all donation forms, and is not the same as the label that you actually specify in the form.

Dave

gsteele@sfaf.org

I'm a day late and a dollar short on this, but we'd like to be able to use the API for more robust operations, for example:

1. Be able to retrieve donation data for custom reports and Data Sync verification

2. Be able to retrieve multiple constituents for update (i.e., no error when pulling a name that delivers multiple records)

3. Be able to resolve new registrations automatically via the API

Thanks!