Hi All,

I believe I have, what should be, a super simple technical challenge.

I'd like to be able to dynamically (on-demand) READ a list of Companies from our Bigin account, and display their names on a web page. It's all read-only server-side stuff, no human interaction required.

Reason: we have a business that rents out rooms to small businesses, and some of them would like to be advertised on a tenant directory on our website, so I'd like to help them with that.

I've reached out directly to Bigin support, but so far it's not clear to me whether they aren't able to help me because what I'm asking is not technically possible (surely not?) or it's not clear what I'm asking, or some other reason.

Of course Bigin has an API, and using COQL (CRM Object Query Language) as a Query API seems like it should be able to do exactly what I need:

https://www.bigin.com/developer/docs/apis/v2/coql-overview.html

I'm a former PHP developer, but these days I get ChatGPT to write the code that I need for simple actions, reports etc.

So the code SHOULD IMHO look something like this:

1. <?php
   
   // Bigin CRM API endpoint for COQL queries
   $api_url = "https://www.zohoapis.com/bigin/v1/coql";
   
   // Your Bigin CRM API authentication token
   $auth_token = "YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN";
   
   // COQL query to fetch company names
   $query = json_encode([
       "select_query" => "SELECT Company_Name FROM Companies"
   ]);
   
   // cURL initialization
   $ch = curl_init($api_url);
   
   // cURL options
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $query);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
       "Authorization: Zoho-oauthtoken $auth_token",
       "Content-Type: application/json"
   ]);
   
   // Execute cURL request and fetch response
   $response = curl_exec($ch);
   
   // Check for cURL errors
   if (curl_errno($ch)) {
       echo "cURL Error: " . curl_error($ch);
       curl_close($ch);
       exit;
   }
   
   // Close cURL resource
   curl_close($ch);
   
   // Decode JSON response
   $response_data = json_decode($response, true);
   
   // Check for API errors
   if (isset($response_data['code'])) {
       echo "API Error: " . $response_data['message'];
       exit;
   }
   
   // Display company names on the web page
   if (isset($response_data['data'])) {
       echo "<h1>Company Names</h1>";
       echo "<ul>";
       foreach ($response_data['data'] as $company) {
           echo "<li>" . htmlspecialchars($company['Company_Name']) . "</li>";
       }
       echo "</ul>";
   } else {
       echo "No company names found.";
   }
   ?>

I've pointed out to Bigin support that it's very common for companies with APIs to share sample scripts for multiple different coding languages, to help developers and would-be developers to get started, e.g. like this:

https://docs.perplexity.ai/reference/post_chat_completions

Has anyone else been able to achieve what I want to achieve, or similar? If so, can you give me some guidance?

Thanks!