Look up contact by phone

API Q&A
1

I’d like to look up contacts by phone number over the API when an email address is not available.

I’ve tried both DataService.query and DataService.findByField with no luck.

Taking a known phone number in from the Phone1 field in an existing contact record (ie (555) 555-5555), I am able to look up records by that number in the web interface. I am not able to find records using the same number over the API with ‘query’ or ‘findByField’. I tested the following values against Phone1.

555
5555555555
(555) 555-5555
%5%

Is there anything special about querying a phone field?

I tried sending just ‘Phone’ as the field name and got an appropriate error. For good measure, I tried this process with multiple phone numbers.

At this point I feel like there must be something really obvious I am missing.

If it matters, I’m working with the Novak PHP SDK. Sample code:

private function lookupInfusionsoftContactByPhone($phone) {
    return $this->lookupInfusionsoftRecord('Phone1', $phone);
}

private function lookupInfusionsoftRecord($key, $value) {
    return \Infusionsoft_DataService::findByField(
        new \Infusionsoft_Contact(),
        $key, $value, null, null, false, $this->infusionsoft );
}

Thanks!

2

I found my error. In findByField, I was sending ‘null’ for the number of records to return. Ask and you will receive!

3

And for reference, the record matched on the formatted phone number and on the wildcard:

Matches:
(555) 555-5555
%5%

Does not match:
555
5555555555

4

I’m not really sure though if I can trust that Infusionsoft will always store phone numbers in this format. Maybe possibly for Phone1, Phone2, etc.

So just in case I am throwing in a bunch of wildcards, ie

%5%5%5%5%5%5%5%5%5%5%

private function formatPhoneForMatching($phone) {
    $numbers = str_split(preg_replace('/\D/', '', $phone));
    return '%' . implode('%', $numbers) . '%';
}
5

@calebtr,

You cannot trust that the format of the phone number field will be consistent. There are too many variations. This, as I’m sure you are seeing, creates a difficulty in your case as the query is a string literal query. If the phone numbers were pre-filterable then that would be different. The only way to be sure in your case is to remove all non-number characters and then compare, which you can’t do until the information is pulled from IS. I might consider a small script that takes the phone number, strips all non numerics and then stored the number only value in a custom field. Then you would have a more reliable query when you needed it.

6

Good idea. And since the wildcard support for dataservice.query is undocumented, I probably shouldn’t rely on it.

7

Hey,

The way you mentioned above works just fine and it really helped me a lot for searching contacts on IFS with phone numbers, irrespective of the format they are saved in.

Thanks :raised_hands:

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