Testing?

Test, Test, Test is something that Jan Brady would say if she was in email marketing.  It's tricky finding time to test but worth the investment to make your integration a fully automated process. So what are a couple of ways that you can test your integration?

Enterprise API 

• It's always best to use a test account, once you have completed your entire work, you can simply change the username and password, as well as letting us know to enable your production account for API access.
• You can also view some sample output, use var_dump(), print_r(), print Dumper to view the output of an object.
• Create use cases where you know that the API will fail.
• If your integration includes sending out campaigns, you can send an email to api-support@verticalresponse.com and we can put in some complimentary credits.

Partner API

• Test your integration on multiple accounts, rather than one account to verify that everything works fine.  

API Updates

Sample Code
In addition to our sample code in C#, Java, PHP and Perl, we have released sample code in Ruby. Instructions are provided in all the sample code as to how to create the necessary class from the VR API WSDL. Within a week we will be releasing a ColdFusion example (thanks to Jill Crimmins at Locus Interactive for some help on this).

Reporting and Method Output Changes
In order to increase the accuracy of dates in reports generated by the API server, we added a 'seconds' value to dates written to csv and tab-delimited files. The reports affected are generated by the following methods:

• downloadList()
• downloadListBackground()
• downloadCampaignRecipientsResults()
• downloadCampaignRecipientsResultsBackground()
• downloadCompanyUnsubscribesAndBounces()

Also, EmailCampaign objects returned by enumerateCampaigns() have a field called "status" which we will be deprecating in the future. We've added a new field called "display_status" which we recommend using instead. Below is the mapping from "status" to "display_status."

Note: "Failure" is not a common occurrence and is looked at immediately by our engineering team.

Events

Register Now for the 1-Day VerticalResponse Spring Marketing Conference
April 23 - Hotel Nikko, San Francisco
Early Bird Special $99!

If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, send them to api-inquiry@verticalresponse.com

To read previous editions of the API Newsletter go to VR Labs website and then to news section.
 

 In This Issue

• Introduction

• API Updates

• Notification Contact List

• Did you know?

• events 

Notification Contact List

Do you have an API enabled account and  would like to be notified if we are having issues with our API and your using another email address other than your VR login username? If so, simply reply to this email with the username for the account and the email address that you want to use. 

Did you know?

You can view the object or values that will be outputed for each specific method?

At the end of each section for a method, we provide an 'output' link that takes you to documentation for the object and its fields.