XML Polling API

To integrate with our registration service, create an XML feed of your full attendee list. We will poll that feed periodically (every 20 minutes), importing any new attendees and optionally sending each an invitation to join your community. Attendee records are de-duplicated based on unique ID, e-mail address or full name, so you don’t have to worry about “new” vs “old” attendees, just serve up the full list to us and we can handle it from there.

To enable your event for XML polling, please contact info@pathable.com.

Look-up Fields

The following fields are used to look-up existing records. They are tried in the order listed and only a single field is ever used. At least one look-up method is required.

external_id A unique ID managed by you or your registration provider. This ID will be stored with the Pathable user record and used whenever provided. Use this if you don’t have an email address (or even a name).
primary_email A unique, valid email address. Users are unique by email address across all your Pathable communities but an email address is not necessarily required for every record.
[first_name, last_name] The first and last name of an attendee. If neither external_id nor primary_email are provided, the combination of first name and last name will be used to find existing users.

Data Fields

The following fields can be stored with every attendee record. Each is set after a record is either found via a look-up field (see above) or created anew.

external_id A unique ID managed by you or your registration provider.
primary_email A unique, valid email address.
first_name The first name of an attendee. May include additional name parts (such as middle name) space separated.
last_name The last name of an attendee.
title The job title of an attendee, typically displayed after the organization name.
organization_name The organization name of an attendee.
credentials The credentials for an attendee, such as PhD. or LMP.
bio A full text bio or attendee description. Contents can include a limited set of HTML.
visible Whether or not this attendee should be visible in the community initially. If this is set to false, the attendee won’t be shown on the attendee facing side until they sign-in for the first time and confirm their profile.
answers_attributes
question_id The numerical ID of the question that the answer is to map to. This can be be found through the host tools by inspecting the URL when editing a question (e.g., http://example.pathable.com/host#questions/14 means the question_id is 14
answer Value to write to the profile for that profile question.

Example

Below is a sample of valid XML Pathable can import.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<users>
  <user>
  <external_id>2lk332klsd21</external_id>
  <primary_email>peter@pathable.com</primary_email>
  <first_name>Peter T.</first_name>
  <last_name>Brown</last_name>
  <organization_name>Pathable &amp;amp; Pounds</organization_name>
  <title>CTO</title>
  <credentials>PhD.</credentials>
  <bio>CTO at Pathable, Inc.</bio>
  <visible>false</visible>
  <answers_attributes>
    <question_id>686</question_id>
    <answer>beagle</answer>
  </answers_attributes>
  <answers_attributes>
    <question_id>684</question_id>
    <answer>pound cake</answer>
  </answers_attributes>
</users>

Important Note: All XML feeds must be fully valid XML or they will be rejected by our parser. That includes escaping characters such as ampersands (which should be rendered &amp;, for example). A full list of the characters requiring escaping can be found on the XML Character entity references article.

Pathable APIs