CRM APIs - what's missing?

Question

Hi everyone,
We are interested to hear from those of you currently using the current SOAP CRM APIs what's missing and what are the major problems you are currently facing while using these.
Thanks,
Cristinel

Answer 1

Hi TheBCMan,
BC provides backend apis and a way to these APIs in frontend (module_webresource). With this you can create your own apis for your site where you control the data you want to expose. Here is a simple use case which can be achieved with what we currently have in production:
I want to create a sign up form where user must choose a username and a password. As a constraint, I want to keep username unique within my site and I want to be able to check through AJAX if a given username value is reserved or not. The strategy for achieving this is presented below:
1. Create a page on your site (e.g /max-2014/backend/check-username-uniqueness.html with the following code in it):
{module_webresource resource="customers" version="v3" where="\{'username': {{this.globals.get.username}}\}" fields="id" collection="customers" template="" skip="0" limit="1"}
2. From your browser access the follow url: http://<site-domain>/max-2014/backend/check-username-uniqueness.html?json=true&username=bcman. Once you did this you will get a valid json object which contain customers as key. customers.totalItemsCount tells you how many customers already have bcman username.
3. Write your client side code and use this API through ajax.
               var username = "bcman";
                var response = $.ajax({
                    "url": "/max-2014/backend/check-username-uniqueness.html?username=" + username + "&json=true",
                    "type": "GET"
                response.done(function(data) {
                    if(data.customers.totalItemsCount == 0) {
                         console.log("username available");
                         return;
                    var customer = data.customers.items[0];
                    console.log("Username is taken by user with id: " + customer.id);
Early next week we will publish several how to tutorials on our documentation covering module_webresource.
Please let me know what you think. You might also find useful another discussion from forum: Web App API and front-end pages
Regards,
Radu