I cant find a place in the UI or in the API to search for a person by email address. Im building a zen cart module to save out customers to highrise and there is really no way for me to use the “update” command reliably without a unique identifier of some sort. I figured email address would be a great way to go but i cant find a way to do that anywhere. Anyone have any ideas? Basically when a user registers on my site i want to query highrise using their email address to see if they exist already, if they dont, create a new contact, otherwise update the existing. Thanks!
brian

I’m discovering Highrisehq API and I’ve not been able to search people by email address or phone number.
This should be the first step for you to check if a customer already exists.

My understanding of API is that the request bellow is only working for some fields :
curl -u token:X https://subdomain.highrisehq.com/people.xml?title=CEO

It does work for title but it doesn’t for id, last-name , zip or city.
For id, it might come from the fact an id field is stored as an integer and maybe this should be reflected in query.
For other fields, I don’t have a good explaination, at the moment.

How did you query email address ?

What we did is search by last name, and then search the results to match an email address.

This method works in our case, where we have someone supplying full contact information, and we want to test for an exisiting entry. It is of course an imperfect solution, since it relies on the last names matching (exactly, but I suppose we could just offer 3-4 letters to widen the test).

I think it’s disappointing something seemingly as simple as this is not offered. Email address is one of the best unique identifiers, and a simple select by email match should be straight-forward.

Though currently undocumented, you can search for additional fields using the ‘criteria’ parameter like so:

/parties/search.xml?criteria[phone]=123
/parties/search.xml?criteria[state]=IL

They can also be combined to narrow the results:

/parties/search.xml?criteria[state]=IL&criteria[zip]=60622

You can’t search by email at this time.

Good news! We just pushed support for advanced search by email, both via the web interface and the API. The API documentation has been updated to reflect this:

http://developer.37signals.com/highrise