Organization Contacts - Duplicate handling

[ThomasLi80]

Hi

We are currently maintaining a list of contacts in our org in a different system. I would like to sync these to the Webex Organization Contacts.

I have found the relevant APIs here: https://developer.webex.com/docs/api/v1/organization-contacts

I managed to create a Webex Application which is able to access the data. So far so good. 

My main question is, is how are duplicates handled right now. I can see that each contact will get a contact Id (assigned by Webex automatically if I understand this correctly). Does Webex do any duplicate checking? It would be great if we could store a string of random data in some field so we can create a link between the internal ID and the Webex Id.

Is there any chance I get the newly created Id when I call the Create Contact API?

[dtibbe · Accepted solution]

There is no duplicate checking, ie. you may call the same post request twice and get two new contacts. Identity or equality in case of contacts is hard, "John Doe" or "Max Musterman" for the Germans may be named multiple persons.. What if there are two with the same name but having different numbers? Or one administrator adds a "John Doe" with company info and the other one does not. Should abritray contacts be merged?

Feel free to post an enhancement request at https://ciscocollabcustomer.ideas.aha.io/.

The endpoint's response contains the contactId the contact has gotten. Simply parse/extract it from the Json object

[ThomasLi80]

HI @dtibbe . Thank you for your response.

Not having any duplicate checking is perfectly fine with us, no need to change anything there because I guess every organization handles this differently. The question came up because the documentation on the page I posted doesn't say that the contactId is returned in the response (I just double checked, it's not there) and that made it impossible to determine which contact was actually created.

Yet, I just tried the API and in fact, the contact ID gets returned which is what I had actually hoped for. So I guess this whole thing is a documentation issue.

How do we report erroneous/missing documentation?

Anyway, your response was spot on. Thank you.

[dtibbe]

You are right, it is not documented. If you run the request from the developer portal you will see it in the displayed response.

Bugs can be submitted devsupport@webex.com, see https://developer.webex.com/support