Developer Documentation

The Contact Importer API

CloudSponge offers its very own RESTful Address Book API to connect your web application to the contact sources. Use this method if you want to provide a user experience that is not supported by our widget interface.

We highly recommend that you start by choosing one of the wrappers listed below since most of the hard work is already done, but if you have special needs that aren't addressed in our wrappers, then feel free to take the do-it-yourself approach.

Open Source Library

There are a few open source libraries available, which wrap the API request and response sets into specific programming languages. These may make it easier for you to connect your web application to CloudSponge.

NOTE: These open source libraries have been built by the open source community. CloudSponge.com cannot guarantee 100% support for these libraries.

Windows Live Migration

CloudSponge has made the migration to a Windows Live CSV upload easy by ensuring that your integration doesn't break or change when they change their API. However, the user experience can be improved by providing an inline form on your page for the CSV upload. This is better than a popup because is keeps the user focussed on your page and it keeps the style consistent with your site.

Here we describe the basics of updating your application to use an inline csv upload. Once these steps are complete, you can focus on tailoring the messaging and style to match your application.

Step 1: Get the Upload URL

Using a value for return_url, initiate an import for a Windows Live import using the same begin_import/user_consent endpoint you normally would. Specify a value for the return_url to a page that will merge back into your events flow after the upload form posts to the CloudSponge API. Hang onto the the value of consent_url that comes from the API is the URL that you'll use in the form in Step 2.

The import_id is added to the query string by the API, so you don't need to build the redirect_url with the import_id in it.

Step 2: Render the Upload Form

Using the consent_url as the action, render an upload form on your page.

Below is a very simple example of a form using the HTML upload element.

  <form action="[consent_url]" method="post">
    <input type="file" name="csv_file">
  </form>

The most important points to note are:

action="[consent_url]": the value of the form's action attribute must be replaced with the consent_url obtained from the call to begin_import
method="post": the method must be post to send the file content in the form body
name="csv_file": the name of the upload input must be 'csv_file'

Step 3: Merge with your Events Flow

The return_url that you specified in Step 1 should be your standard application page that polls events from the CloudSponge API. For example, the updated _PHP reference application_ uses a redirect to the 'step_2_events.php' page. If this is the case, you are done!

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