Append to a contact property?

I would like to append to a contact’s property vs overwriting it. How can this be done? I’d rather not make a separate api call to get the contact’s current property value only to turn around and make another api call to update it with data I compose locally. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thank you

Hi @jamjud34,

It’s not currently possible to append a value or option to a property on a contact record. We do keep a record of any previous values, and those historical values can be used in lists and workflows, but if you need to append and keep the current values, you’d need to pull the existing value, append your new value, then update the contact with the full updated list of values.

Can you please let me know how do i pull the existing values and append new values in curl and php.

What about with Operations Hub? How can you append a value with ops hub

This is absoloutly a huge issue for us! we have many products and product lines and when a customer submits a new form it overrides the data that is there and pushes the current to the history which is not searchable when building lists and makes it very hard for targeted marketing!

Being able to select if we want to append the property OR update the property in a workfow for example would be fantastic! I know I have seen apend somewhere I dont recall where though.

Hey All!

Samantha here from HubSpot support. When you are making the API call to append more values to a property, in order to not have to retype everything you would want the value section to start with a

;

and then the next desired value.

example:

;chocolate

I hope this helps!

Hi @samlucas how would this work in the scenario i posted above when someone submits a new form - how can i ensure that it appends that property and not completely replace?

Still looking for a solution to solve this issue..

Hey @Melly2022 ,
Sorry about the delay in this, I never got an alert on your first reply back. At this time, we don’t have a way to set this up for a form submission by default, this will overwrite any previous property values. Derek mentioned before a known workaround for this, utilizing the property history to gain access to the current values, add in the new values and then update the contact with the full list of values.

@Derek_Gervais @samlucas

Do we have an update for this in 2022?

I’d like to know this as well please.

Hey there, is there any update regarding this issue?

The fact this hasn’t been fixed in 5 years is quite frankly appalling. Get this done, HubSpot!

Far more complicated than it needs to be. HubSpot needs to fix this pronto! You’ve had many years of users telling you the current system doesn’t work.