Changeing billing contact for an account throug external api

[Aita]

Hi

 

Is there a way to add / change a billing contact for a client through the external api calls.

 

I have not found any documentation in addclient or updateclient api calls where one can specify billing contact id

[steph.hope]

Same question here. Needing to import a lot of clients and at least a hundred need billing contact set, is there really no way to do it by API?

[brian!]

8 hours ago, steph.hope said:

Same question here. Needing to import a lot of clients and at least a hundred need billing contact set, is there really no way to do it by API?

I would have thought the AddContact API would be an option here...

of course, you might have to work out whether these contacts need to be users, contacts or both - and that depends on what they need to do, e.g whether they need to login, or just receive relevant emails.

[steph.hope]

From what understand I can add the contact just fine using that API, but I'm not able to set it as the billing contact.

[brian!]

13 hours ago, steph.hope said:

From what understand I can add the contact just fine using that API, but I'm not able to set it as the billing contact.

a billing contact in the sense that they receive invoice emails ? I think you should just need to use the email_preferences[invoice] boolean option in the API, e.g set it to true.

the complicating factor for you in this is that the management of these "people" will be split between their "user" settings and their "contact" settings.

I know in v7, the email settings and permissions of contacts is all on the same page in the admin area; in v8, they're not... email settings under contacts, permissions under users - hence why these people may have to be both contacts and users.

[steph.hope]

Nah, we have to have the actual 'billing contact' selected on the client so that the invoices are addressed to that contact and listed against them in our accounting software. I've resigned myself to the fact I'll have to either do it manually for these clients or do something with the database. Thanks for your advice though 🙂

[steph.hope]

So I'd believed WHMCS when they said "...in fact this will not work with our API Credential Roles functionality. If you want to implement a URL that can run custom code, I would recommend using an addon module with the admin area output or client area output functionality".

Turns out this isn't true and the extremely roundabout way I'd built a messy solution using an Addon Module was unnecessary. All that was required was manually adding a permission to tblapi_roles to allow access to the custom file.

(Thanks to the below post for the hint)

 

In case it's of use to anyone else - Please test it before using, I make no claims about its correctness:

Request Parameters "SetBillingContact"

Parameter	Type	Description	Required
action	string	“SetBillingContact”	Required
clientid	int		Optional
contactid	int		Optional

Response Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
result	string	The result of the operation: success or error

<?php
if (!defined("WHMCS")) {
    exit("This file cannot be accessed directly");
}

$clientID = $whmcs->get_req_var("clientid");
$contactID = $whmcs->get_req_var("contactid");

if ($clientID == "" || $contactID == ""){
    $apiresults = array("result" => "error", "message" => "Missing required variable");
} else {
    try {
        $client = WHMCS\User\Client::findorfail($clientID);
        $client->billingcid = $contactID;
        $client->save();
        $apiresults = array('result' => 'success');
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        $apiresults = array("result" => "error", "message" => "Client not found");
        return NULL;
    }
}

?>