I first came across Salsa's API quite by accident. As the lead programmer for TriggerID, I was looking to try and integrate one of our products, CampaignWindow, with Salsa for the Young Democrats of America. Many YD chapters around the country are using CampaignWindow for their web presence but also use Salsa (known internally as DEMopolis) for their membership lists, etc.

In poking around Salsa I noticed it had a link in the footer for Developers which contained cut-and-paste code for a form clients could use on their site to add users. Wondering if I might be able to automate this, on a hunch I did a Google search for "DIA API" and came across this. [The non-Google path to our documentation hive is here. -ed.]

This was a gold mine, listing all tables and associated field names, and though the documentation was all geared towards how to interface with your data via web forms, I decided to try and see if a silent HTTP POST would work too. Setting up a test was easy enough, but due to not knowing one crucial piece of information, it didn't work and I spent several hours trying to figure out what I did wrong. Here's the initial code (in ColdFusion):