Do profile updates with Postman

Tip

You should know hot to perform an API request with the postman tool or something similar.

You have been tasked to call the ahead import API to add information to user profiles. Great! Let us trace the necessary steps that you can successfully call the ahead API with a tool like postman.

Getting the API-Key

Getting API-Keys Learn how to get API-Keys in order to authorize your requests

Doing a profile update in Postman

You will need the correct endpoint URL as well as HTTP Verb, namely PUT. See the following screenshot:

We will first try an update via a JSON array. You need to add a custom header field named x-functions-key. It’s value is the one you copied from the API-Keys-section in ahead. The Content-Type header will be set automatically when you go to the Body-Tab and set it to raw, choosing JSON as the input.

The input should adhere to the structure specified under The person update JSON object.

Now you should be ready to send the request by pressing Send!

If all went well, Postman will tell you that the http status code response was 200 and you also got an id back as the response body.

When things go wrong If the response status code is not 200, check out our guide what you can learn about your request from ahead's Import Logs

The import log

When you head back to the same page in ahead where you got the API-Keys you should notice that your import was registered.

Clicking on the details accesses the log file relevant for the import.

Its content would now look like this:

2023-11-22T15:47:38 - RequestId: 98e51b88-932d-4a33-8e13-58fc39d7faf1
Success - PersonUpdated - 'joe@company.com' updated

Tip

When you automate the profile import API calls e.g. in a nightly job, requests done within a short timeframe will be listed under one entry in the Import Logs - hence, one log file may contain several request IDs. That’s where the search field comes in handy.

You should now know the basics of how to call the API.

Additional reading

Authorization & Authentication Learn how to authorize your requests

calling the Endpoint Read the specification of the people import API