CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey, good idea!

I would have preferred to declare it like this: ... This way, WCF sends the contact info as xml (or json) in the post data of the request. But CiviCRM cannot handle this.

I don't know anything about WCF, but... the REST API should accept JSON document if it's embeded in the "json" field, e.g.

http://example.com/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/rest.php
  ?entity=Contact
  &action=create
  &json={"contact_type":"Individual","first_name":"Alice","last_name":"Alison"}

At a high-level, the submission is still sent with x-www-form-encoded, but most of the data is encoded with JSON. Do you think that's enough?

Sorry for the late reply, I thought I turned on notifications for this thread, but it seems I did not :-)

By default, if you send data to a REST service with WCF, WCF asserts that the actual data has to be in the body of the post request, and not in the URL.
CiviCRM expects the data to be in the URL, so I had to code around this. Which is not a big problem.

At the moment, my code handles adding/changing contacts and addresses.

I had to do some more fiddling, because I had problems with non-existing birth/deceased dates. And the fact that the root element of returned data is always called ResultSet, independently of the type of the results, required me to implement another strange hack to deserialize the data.

It all seems to work. But if you are reading this, and you know something about WCF, I would be very grateful if you could take a look at the code.