uploadContacts.md

Upload Contacts

This guide will walk you through the process of adding new contacts to your account, by uploading them from a CSV file, using the NodeJS library.

Required Access Level: ModifyContacts

What's a contact?

When using Elastic Email, you send emails to contacts – recipients who receive your emails. Contacts can be grouped by created segments or lists.

Preparation

It's NodeJS code, so make sure you have it installed or download it here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

Create a new JavaScript file snippet.js and open it in editor of your preference eg. Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/)

Let's dig into the code

Put the below code to your file.

Load library using below line:

const ElasticEmail = require('@elasticemail/elasticemail-client');

Get client instance:

const client = ElasticEmail.ApiClient.instance;

Generate and use your API key (remember to check a required access level):

const apikey = client.authentications['apikey'];
apikey.apiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY";

In this example we will load a CSV file that contains a list of contacts.

We will use built-in fs api for handling files in NodeJS.

const fs = require('fs');

Create an instance of ContactsApi that will be used to upload contacts.

const contactsApi = new ElasticEmail.ContactsApi();

Create a stream to read data from a file.

const readStream = fs.createReadStream('./files/contacts.csv');

The simplest CSV file requires only one column Email, eg.:

Email
john@johnsmith.com

Find out more by checking our API's documentation: https://elasticemail.com/developers/api-documentation/rest-api#operation/contactsImportPost

Create an options object where we will pass a file data, it's encoding and optionaly a list name to which contacts should be added, otherwise contacts will be added to all contacts.

const options = {
    listName: "New list",
    encodingName: 'utf-8',
    file: readStream,
};

Create a callback function that will be called when response comes back.

In case of error it will display error details, otherwise it will display a success message.

const callback = (error, data, response) => {
    if (error) {
        console.error(error);
    } else {
        console.log('API called successfully.');
        console.log('Contacts added.');
    }
};

And finally, call contactsImportPost method from the API to upload contacts:

contactsApi.contactsImportPost(options, callback);

The whole code to copy and paste:

const ElasticEmail = require('@elasticemail/elasticemail-client');

const client = ElasticEmail.ApiClient.instance;

const apikey = client.authentications['apikey'];
apikey.apiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY";

const fs = require('fs');
const contactsApi = new ElasticEmail.ContactsApi()

const readStream = fs.createReadStream('./files/contacts.csv');

const options = {
    listName: "New list",
    encodingName: 'utf-8',
    file: readStream,
};


const callback = (error, data, response) => {
    if (error) {
        console.error(error);
    } else {
        console.log('API called successfully.');
        console.log('Contacts added.');
    }
};
contactsApi.contactsImportPost(options, callback);

Run the code

node snippet.js