How to know my contact id using the API

[hvelarde]

I'm working on collective.civicrm, an add-on to integrate CiviCRM with Plone, a Python-based CMS.

my implementation stores the URL and the key of the CiviCRM, and the API key of every user.

right now I have implemented a contact search form, quite similar to the basic search form of CiviCRM; I can also select contacts on the results and see more information on them like relationships and activities.

one of the new features I need to implement is adding an activity and that's why I'm asking if it is possible to know the contact id using only the API key.

does anybody else have found a similar use case? how do you solve it?

[Coleman Watts]

Interesting project. I'm curious to know why you don't just go the full Monty and really integrate CiviCRM with Plone. The size of the integration code for, say, Wordpress and CiviCRM is tiny (only a couple thousand lines of code total).

[xavier]

@colemans, probably because it's different languages, it's likely to be on different servers, hence the REST interface.

api_key is filtered quite a bit, you unfortunately can't do a contact.get (api_key:"whatyouseek"). I would create a new extension (use civix to generate the boilerplate) that implements a new api getcurrent. creating that api is simply putting a file api/v3/Contact/Getcurrent.php that contains function civicrm_api3_contact_getcurrent

check other in the api/v3 in civi to give you an idea of the syntax.

X+

[hvelarde]

thank you, Xavier; that makes a lot of sense.

[Eileen]

I'm fairly sure the source contact defaults to 'user_contact_id' when creating an activity. This value is barely documented (feel free to take that as a challenge) but is generally translated to the logged in user's contact id during api calls

[xavier]

Another trick Eileen reminded me of: instead of putting the id of the contact id, put the string  'user_contact_id' and it will default to the logged in one.
(the magic is in _civicrm_api3_validate_integer)

X+

[hvelarde]

thanks! I'll test it...