Last time we looked at the basics of Filtering Result Sets. This time we’ll look at another great new filtering mechanism that was added to version 4 of the Bronto API. In the past many of these types of filtering operations had to be performed by reading the entire contact database and then filtering locally. In some cases, with a large contact database, this operation could potentially take much longer than desired due to the increased number of back and forth calls over the internet that was required.
If you used the previous version of the API you may have used the filtering that was available. You had the option to check equality(=) for all data types as well as inequalities(>, <, >=, <=) with numeric and date types. In version 4 of the API we have added some very useful filter operators. Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the new operators.
To The Operators Jeeves
StartsWith / EndsWith can be used as a string comparison and are especially useful when trying to filter down your contacts by matching a portion of their email address. For instance, let’s say you wanted to see how engaged contacts with only yahoo.com have been. You could use the EndsWith operator and “yahoo.com” as the value to request just these contacts. Once you have these contacts you can use the aggregated statistics that are returned to create a customized report with just the information that you need.
But Wait, There’s More…
So you actually want all of the contacts except those yahoo.com addresses? You’re in luck, you can change that EndsWith operator to DoesNotEndWith. Why stop there? You can add additional filters to crop that list down even more. You only want contacts that signed up this year? Add a filter using the new SameYearAs operator? Want to get contacts that signed up specifically between two dates? Check out the Before / After and BeforeOrSameDay / AfterOrSameDay.
With this version of the API we have made an effort to open up the filtering to give you more options. As your contact database grows this will be increasingly important to you. Hopefully you will find these additional possibilities helpful. Let us know what you think!
Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto
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