Protect everyone's Servers šŸ˜€ Please add updated_since Filter to Contacts Endpoint

Feature Requests
1

Please can the ā€œupdated_sinceā€ filter be added to the contacts endpoint for the API (Support for updated_since date filter)? We need to keep our Usersā€™ customer list up to date with changes made in FreeAgent to keep your data and our own synchronised.

Without any webhooks, we are forced to use polling. This polling would be far more effective if we didnā€™t need to download a complete contacts list every time we poll (hundreds or thousands of records). With this filter, I would not download any contact data most of the time, reducing server load for both Business Liferaft and FreeAgentšŸ‘

As an aside, I saw a discussion about adding webhooks a few years ago. Contacts and invoices are the endpoints we are most interested in for our app. A Webhook for added, updated, and removed (this could make the old ID available to match a deletion on my App). With webhooks, we could stop using polling, saving even more capacity!

2

This feature would be really helpful. You can create some workaround in implementation using pagination and ordering by last update date, but dedicated filter would be more efficient for both sides.

1 Like
3

Thanks, Martin,

Iā€™ve added sort=-updated_at to my request to ensure the most recently updated records appear first. I then check how many results have an updated_at value greater than my updated_since. If no records on the current page meet this condition, I know thereā€™s no need to check further pages.

That said, I still need to download at least a full page of data each time I run the check. This approach works, but it does make my code more complex and slower than ideal.

1 Like
4

Hi folks,

To quote my colleague Aqib:

Weā€™ve just rolled out support for the updated_since parameter on contacts! You can find the full details and examples in our official announcement here: New ā€œupdated_sinceā€ date Filter for the Contacts Endpoint. This should help you pull only the records that have changed since your last sync and keep things more efficient.

We hope that helps - as always, let us know if you have any questions pertaining to these changes.

James

1 Like
5

Thank you, James. This is exactly what we needed to make everything run more efficiently :partying_face:

Fingers crossed that webhooks are on the way too :crossed_fingers:

1 Like