The Big API Update: Votes and Image Uploads

Mon, 7 Nov 2016, in Helprace, Releases

Every day we improve the Helprace platform by releasing new updates, bug fixes and tutorials.

And today’s no exception. We’re growing our API with a number of new functions that improve vote tracking, image uploads and give you more control over notifications than ever.

Here’s what’s new:

Get out there and vote!

Voting is a huge part of the Helprace community – and our changes to the API reflect that.

We’re now supplying voting and topic information to the API response. This includes the total number of votes (positive and negative vote totals are also presented separately), and the number of people who voted on a topic.

Secondly, a new API endpoint has been added. It allows agents to vote for topics on behalf of the user. As for users, they can vote for ideas, problems or questions right from your integration.

You’ll also have detailed information for analytics such as users who voted for a topic and the number of votes they’ve cast. This allows you to visualize what your users are voting for and what topics are important to them.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Ever have an API let you down? You’d feed it fancy HTML and all was well… until the site where the data originated from went offline? Ouch! Now all your articles are referencing images that no longer exist! Hopefully you backed it all up..

With Helprace you can leave it all behind – thanks to our automated image import function. Just push an article to the API and it’ll take care of downloading all images referenced in your article to the Helprace cloud. These images will also appear in your article editor, so you can re-use them if necessary.

There’s one more trick with images. A new endpoint allows you to upload an image and get its URL, so you can add it to the body of your ticket, topic or article.

Give your customers peace and quiet

You might have noticed there was no difference in ticket/topic creation via your help desk admin panel or the API. That is, every user associated with that item gets an email notification all the same.

We realized this might prove troublesome if you’re importing thousands of tickets via the API – you probably don’t want to notify every customer and staff member of your housekeeping activities :)

From now on, while creating or updating the following via the API, you’ll have the option of disabling (where applicable) the notifications for:

• Topics
• Topic replies
• Topic comments
• Tickets
• Ticket replies
• Ticket updates

Some additional changes

The API allows anonymous as well as regular users to create tickets. Only the required fields must be changed.

Agents can create community topics, replies or comments on behalf of the user. When these items are returned, ‘editor’ refers to the user and ‘submitter’ to the agent who posted the item.

The new ‘host’ column in the API logs to identify the source of the API call at a glance.

Last but not least, we also fixed a few issues found since the last API release. Thanks for pointing them out to us!

Check the API documentation for more details.

Tags: release