My Recruitments – Google Contacts API
I have been using this website to manage my recruitment process since I created it.
This quite intensive utilization showed me the missing functionalities, and the most important was to create a link between the contacts in the application and my Google Contacts.
So I decided to look into the Google Contacts API (http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/). They propose a Javascript interface, that can be used in my PHP/JS code. The downside of the Javascript interface is that they provide documentation for the 1.0 version of the API, while the last Java version is the 3.0…
At first, I read the documentation, and tried to simply list all my contacts to get used to this API. It’s very easy to use, the connection to your Google account is provided by Google, you just have to authorize the application to access to your account.
Authorizing the application to access your Google Account
Then, you can use the proposed functions to easily retrieve your contacts, create a new contact, manage groups,…
The API misses however some useful functionalities. For example, you can’t search a contact by his name, you have to retrieve all contacts, and then browse through the results, test for each entry if the names match, and you have your contact. Also, if you want to attribute a group to a contact, you have to use the group URI. So you have to browse all groups, search the right group by its name, and then extract its URI. These actions cost a lot of execution time, so I think the API could be really improved by implementing a few more search functionalities.
Right now, all the modifications I have made are still on my development environment, but I plan on uploading them on my production server. The main change I made is the export functionality. You have to create a group called Recruitment in you Google Contacts, and then you can export your contacts from My Recruitment to your Google contacts.
And that’s all for now !
