Benefits of Migration

This article describes the benefits of migrating from Cvent’s SOAP API to REST API.

Migration

The Cvent REST API is the successor to the SOAP API. REST offers a scalable, flexible, and efficient approach to building web services.

Capacity

Switching from Cvent’s SOAP API to its REST API offers many benefits, with one significant advantage the increased capacity for API calls.

The capacity of Cvent’s SOAP API caps at 10,000 calls, restricting you to a maximum of 10,000 API calls within 24 hours. In contrast, the REST API provides varying capacity limits based on the plan you opt for, offering more flexibility:

• For the Free plan, you can make up to 1,000 API calls per day. This can benefit small-scale projects or users with lower API usage requirements.
• The Professional plan’s capacity increases to 15,000 API calls per day. This suits organizations with higher API usage needs or requiring more frequent interactions with Cvent’s system.
• The Enterprise plan’s capacity limit is much higher, allowing up to 500,000 API calls per day. This plan is designed for large-scale projects or users who require extensive API integration and processing capabilities.

New Features

Switching from Cvent’s SOAP API to their REST API offers many benefits based on new endpoints available in the REST API:

• Attendee Activities: The Attendee Activities endpoint allows you to retrieve information about attendee activities, such as session attendance, booth visits, and event interactions. This can help you gain valuable insights into attendee engagement and behavior, allowing you to analyze and optimize your event strategies.
• Engagement Scores: With the Engagement Scores endpoints, you can access attendee engagement scores, which provide insight into how actively involved attendees are in event activities. This information can help you identify highly engaged attendees and tailor personalized experiences or target specific segments for follow-up actions.
• Event Features: The Event Features endpoint enables you to toggle event features and launch events programmatically. This allows you to automate event management processes, such as enabling or disabling specific event features, controlling event access, and launching events seamlessly.
• Exhibitors: The Exhibitors endpoint provides access to exhibitor-related information, including exhibitor details, exhibitor staff, and exhibitor files. This can be beneficial for exhibitor management, allowing you to retrieve and update exhibitor information, manage staff assignments, and handle exhibitor files programmatically.
• Attendee Identification Service: The Attendee Identification Service endpoint allows you to verify attendee identities based on email addresses or other identifiers in your own database. This can be useful for authentication purposes or validating attendee information.
• New Surveys: The New Surveys endpoint enables you to create, manage, and analyze surveys programmatically. This allows you to streamline survey processes, automate survey creation, and gather valuable feedback from attendees more efficiently.
• SCIM User Management: The SCIM User Management endpoint provides capabilities for managing user accounts, including creating, updating, and deleting user records. This can simplify user management processes, such as provisioning and deactivating user accounts, ensuring accurate and up-to-date user information within the Cvent system.
• Video Management: The Video Management endpoint allows you to manage videos associated with events, sessions, or other event-related content. This can include uploading, updating, and retrieving video files programmatically, enhancing the multimedia experience for attendees.

By leveraging these new endpoints in the REST API, you can enhance your integration capabilities, automate processes, gain deeper insights, and improve event management efficiency. This can ultimately result in a more seamless and personalized experience for both event organizers and attendees.

Concepts

This section provides a detailed explanation of key concepts related to the Cvent REST API, including authentication, rate limits & quotas, OpenAPI specification, and data domains.

Authentication

The Cvent REST API employs OAuth 2.0 to verify requests sent to the platform. The current authorization flow supported by the system is client credentials. The authorization code flow is available to planner users with administrative roles within Cvent. Developer users don’t have access to use the authorization code flow.

Account users can create workspaces and invite developers, who in turn create applications that grant them client credentials to begin making calls. See Inviting your Developers and Developer Quickstart

Rate Limits & Quotas

Cvent has implemented rate limits on accounts to maintain the platform’s operational stability. If an application surpasses these limits, it will receive an HTTP 429 error code, accompanied by a “Limit Exceeded” message. The specific limits are dependent on the user’s tier: Free, Professional, or Enterprise.

• Free tier users are subject to a limit of 1,000 calls per day and 2 calls per second with a maximum burst of 1 call.
• Professional tier users have a limit of 15,000 calls per day, 10 calls per second, and a max burst of 10 calls.
• Enterprise tier users have a much higher limit of 500,000 calls per day, 25 calls per second, and a maximum burst of 25 calls.

It’s essential to note that these limits are subject to change as the Cvent API Platform continues to evolve.

During your integration with the Cvent platform, always consider the rate limits on API calls. If you encounter an HTTP 429 error code, you have exceeded a limit. The recommended approach is to examine the accompanying error message to determine the next steps. For instance, a “Limit Exceeded” exception implies that you’ve reached your daily quota and should wait until after 12 midnight (+0 GMT) before making further attempts. “Too Many Requests” is an error that can be retried. In such a case, use an exponential back-off mechanism in your code, which waits 2 seconds plus a random number of milliseconds (1-1000) before retrying the API. The wait time should be doubled with each attempt until a successful call is made. If the wait time reaches 16 seconds, it’s advisable to stop and log the error. If you’re uncertain about your account’s usage tier, you can verify it using the Get Current Usage Tier API.

OpenAPI Specification

The OpenAPI Specification is a powerful definition format used for describing RESTful APIs. The specification, which is language-agnostic, creates a clear, concise contract for API capabilities, allowing both humans and computers to understand and interact with the capabilities of the service without requiring access to source code, documentation, or inspecting network traffic.

Cvent’s OpenAPI Specification serves multiple purposes. Firstly, it provides a rich understanding of the API resources, including the available endpoints (such as POST /createUser and GET /listUsers), operations on these endpoints (input and output for each operation), operation parameters, and authentication methods, among other details. Cvent’s OpenAPI specification will serve as a comprehensive guide for developers integrating with the Cvent platform. Developers can download the OpenAPI specification from the API Reference.

Data Domains

The Cvent API is divided into distinct data domains, each serving a specific function. Dividing the API into different data domains provides a more focused and intuitive developer experience. Developers can work with the parts of the API that are relevant to their needs, making it easier to understand and use. This improves developer productivity and reduces the learning curve. It also allows you to tightly control what data domains developers can access via specific permissions.