Mailing list alternative for Search Directory Contacts | XM Community
Question

Mailing list alternative for Search Directory Contacts

  • 2 November 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 122 views

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Hi all,

 

I developed a survey that used the Search Directory Contacts call to retrieve contact details based on a filter combination using name, email and mailing list. For the past couple of weeks that worked 100% fine.

As of this week I noticed this call no longer works for me, returning a 403 - Forbidden error (Access denied to TA entity). According to Qualtrics support this is actually the intended behavior, as I'm not supposed to be able to search the entire (brand) directory. While I get the logic there, I find it extremely strange that it used to work at all than in the past weeks (I changed nothing in the code), and haven't been able to figure out why this changed. Other Directory calls (create and get contacts) do still work.

As I understand it, as a (non-admin) user, I should be using Mailing List calls to get the contact details, but as far as I can see, there are no equivalent Mailing List calls that allow you to filter/search by fields. The only option seems to be to get the entire List and then manually do all the filtering ánd account for the pagination limits. Which feel extremely cumbersome, especially as it will require multiple calls as the Mailing lists grows.

(To preempt the Authenticator suggestions: I need to to match information from multiple contacts across multiple Lists within the same survey, which is not really doable with the Authenticator)

Has anyone been in a similar situation and/or has some code to facilitate searches on Mailing List calls?

Kind regards,

Kerwin


3 replies

Badge

I too had been doing this successfully since March 2023, and as of November 1st see the same error.

{
"meta": {
"httpStatus": "403 - Forbidden",
"error": {
"errorMessage": "Access denied to TA entity",
"errorCode": "TAG_0.4"
},
"requestId": "68e10190-aa28-4450-9040-fcc038cb6c2f"
}
}

I was able to perform the this API call (/directories/{directoryId}/contacts/search), filtering on email and a specific mailing list.

Is this something that can be re-enabled by the brand ambassador?

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

I too had been doing this successfully since March 2023, and as of November 1st see the same error.

 

 

That's good to know, so that suggests that it was indeed some change on Qualtrics side (and not the brand admin)!

Userlevel 4
Badge +6

I will verify that it’s not just you. The search API was a very important part of our processes (we have authenticator lists with up to 500,000 contacts, it’s absurd to have to download all of them) and it just stopped working early this year. Support said it’s because we are on XM Directory Lite, but also tried to claim it’s always been that way and nothing has been changed. Which is obviously complete BS.

 

FWIW I’ve been experimenting with using samples for this purpose - you can download contacts from a sample via API, but I haven’t been able to get the API to generate the new samples successfully.

 

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