CiviCRM Ajax API - Searching by Tag

Question

I'm working with the CiviCRM API and it's been great--I've been able to make a very useful tool for our team. However, I've encountered a problem.

I would like to do a search on contacts based on a tag. However, whenever I make a call to the database asking for a particular tag, I get an error. The following is an example I used on the demo site:

CRM.api3('Contact', 'get', {
  "sequential": 1,
  "tag": "Company"
}).done(function(result) {
  // do something
});

I receive the following error in the response:

{
  "error_code": "no such field",
  "tip": "add debug=1 to your API call to have more info about the error",
  "is_error": 1,
  "error_message": "DB Error: no such field"
}

Now, I receive a different error in test use on my own site, but is it possible in some way to do a search in the API for a contact based on tag?

Answer 1

you are almost there: instead of using the tag name, use the tag id (eg 5 for Volunteers)

CRM.api3('Contact', 'get', {
  "debug": 1,
  "sequential": 1,
  "return": ["tag"],
  "tag": "5"
}).done(function(result) {
  console.log(result);
});

And for performance reasons, we recommend to always set the return param with the list of fields you actually need (by default, it returns way too many that you don't need)

Otherwise, yes, it should work with the name of the tag instead of the id, but given that tags are one of the few entities that don't have an internal name that only the dev can change, I'd rather rely on the id rather than on the visible name that your users can alter