I kept working on my project today at my workplace. All the other days, I was able to write all the time without even thinking, but today I had one problem which took me a lot of time. I currently program a tool to synchronize the local database with a CRM (Costumer Relationship Management). First I had no field on the CRM that I could use as an id/primary key. I need such field because it is possible that some people have the same last- and first name. Later I found out, that I could just create a new field and fill it with the id from the database. Later I found out that I had the problem caused in the moment I requested all contacts to be shown. I already need the id field because the normal function that requests all contacts, returns just a list with all contacts and their last and first name.
To do a small comparison as local database without id/primary key would be not possible and to get my field created (the id/primary key field) I would need another request. I can get up to 100 contacts with one request and when I want all the details I need to do another request for each contact. When I have 20.000 contacts then I already need to make 200 requests to get them all. But I also need 20.000 extra requests just to get the id, and maybe one contact isn’t on the CRM and then I also would need another request per contact.
I contacted a developer from the CRM and he told me that they currently have one parameter which is still in beta and with this parameter I could add another field to the get all contacts result.
I tried his advice and it was working perfectly. Now instead of around 40200 requests I need “just” 200 to compare the database with the CRM.
This assumes my job here. I do such programming stuff all the day. Somehow annoying, but the results are always positive and satisfying.