questions about create method in Constituent Management API

Adrian Cotter

I'm a little puzzled by the documentation on the Constituent Management API for the Create method in particular.

http://open.convio.com/api/constituent-api/server/create-server.html

1) The documentation says several things about login credentials. This is puzzling because presumably we are trying to create a new user, why would the method try an authenticate the user?

2) It also says login_name and login_password are required... which is not true since I've had successful submissions without the fields blank.

Related questions:

3) One scenario where I would like to see authentication, is if a user could enter the username and password they want to use, but this does seem to be part of the method.

4) I tried to use the remove_interest_ids to disable the default email interests, but this does not seem to work.

5) Anyway, we could send a different email from the default registration autoresponder?

tommy Spann

Hey Adrian,

Agreed it's a bit confusing... and that's saying something since it was me who published the docs

Here's what's got your confused. The server-to-server API methods require the third-party server to authenticate with Convio before utilizing the requested methods. This is why there is a login_name and login_password requirement. For additional security we force any third-party server application to identify itself within a pre-determined IP address range.

None of this authentication stuff is needed when using the client methods.

Make sense?

Here's the server-method for the "create" API:

And here's the same method for the client version:

Notice the difference in the authentication section of the docs.

I should probably differentiate the server methods more clearly. Any suggestions for how to do this?

Adrian Cotter

tommy Spann:

Hey Adrian,

Agreed it's a bit confusing... and that's saying something since it was me who published the docs

Here's what's got your confused. The server-to-server API methods require the third-party server to authenticate with Convio before utilizing the requested methods. This is why there is a login_name and login_password requirement. For additional security we force any third-party server application to identify itself within a pre-determined IP address range.

None of this authentication stuff is needed when using the client methods.

Make sense?

Here's the server-method for the "create" API:

And here's the same method for the client version:

Notice the difference in the authentication section of the docs.

I should probably differentiate the server methods more clearly. Any suggestions for how to do this?

Thanks Tompkins.

That makes sense now. The confusion started for me when I read server as in server-side programming (since you mention a bunch of web programming languages on the CM API page) versus client as in JS AJAX requests (all the client side requests can also be programmed with Ruby, ASP.NET, PHP, etc...). Everything I read after didn't quite get past that filter... for instance saying "application" on the server side page was not quite enough a differentiator -- since there are many web applications that would make their requests through the client.

I'm not sure how better to differentiate it verbally. Perhaps having and examples of use/scenarios up on top of the individual method page ( Client requests might be made if you are creating a user from a custom form on your server. Server requests might be made in order to... )?