My very first Cloud Connector

Question

After working with Eloqua as consultant, developer and solution architect for 8 months, I finally managed to get my first Cloud Connector.
The purpose of this post is to reflect on the process, obstacles and general experience in working on the project.
The Cloud Connector itself is a simple SMS blast system used in programs and campaigns to send out text messages to contacts. It saves the message and delivery information on a Custom Object for history and statistics purposes.
The overall experience with working with the Eloqua API is not good. The API seems inconsistent, lacks functionality and most importantly have bad or missing documentation and the example codes are old and does not always reflect the current interface and return objects.
The worst thing about this entire experience is the lack in the REST and BULK API. I did not manage to find any way to interact with the Step of the Cloud Connector using the REST API and had to use the SOAP API to get contacts in the step and complete the step for the contacts. When trying to interact with the Custom Object Records i had a similar issue. I could create and interact with the Custom Object and the Custom Object Records using the REST API, but where not allowed to update existing Custom Object Records using REST. Once again I had to use the SOAP API to get the job done.
I started out using the REST API Client for the project and quickly threw it out. The Client only implemented the base functionality and the entity objects where not complete and hence some data where not available to my application and was discarded by the Client when serializing the JSON to an object. However the worst thing about the REST API Client was that it was hiding system messages on failure. If a failure to process the task occured, the Client simple returned a null object. So no error handling was possible as no exception was thrown nor any information on the error was returned.
So I had to make my own interface implementation and helper functions. I would however recommend making an SDK to make it easier for developers to get working with Eloqua and expanding its functionality and integration possibilities.
I hope others have better experiences with the Eloqua API and hope that Eloqua will try to improve the possibilities of the API.

Answer 1

Hi Jonas,
I am at the moment not doing any Eloqua projects but have made similar experiences and sticked to the SOAP API. Maybe one workarround which could save you using the wsdl which is necessary for programs and additional coding. For me it worked fine.
1. Create a contact field
2. In your program, you create a step where you update the contact field with a string value e.g. cloudconnector2update
3. In your code you query for that value and get returned an array of contacts (avoid to query for more than 100 contacts at a time, otherwise an error turns up, dont ask me why). You can run e.g. a cron job to do this every minute to perform as much operations as possible.
4. After that update processing step you might include a waiting step in order to collect the contacts for further operations. It might be practically as well to add a decision rule after the waiting step to check the value of the contact field and maybe loop contacts back.
Cheers
Thomas