Contact Associations of new created Contact are only available after delay

[pgeimer]

I have enabled the "Create and associate companies with contacts" option in the Companies Settings, which automatically assigns created contacts to existing companies.

Now, when I create a contact via the API that Hubspot automatically associates with an existing company, I can only retrieve the associated companies of the contact via a GET Request after a break of currently 5 seconds (it may be less). If I call the GET Request immediately after creating the contact, I do not get the associations from that contact.

How can I get the associated companies directly when creating the contact and without waiting? And if this is not possible, how many seconds do I have to wait before calling the GET Request, to be sure the associations are available?

[pgeimer]

Hi @Jaycee_Lewis , @weiliang_lee ! Thank you for your fast answers.

@weiliang_leehow do I know when to stop the poll? On the first GET Request without any waiting there was no "associations" property on that contact. But after the 5 seconds delay it was there. Does this mean as soon as there is a "associations" property on the contact that I can stop the poll? Or is it possible that there is a empty "associations" property and the HubSpot System is still searching for associations?

[weiliang_lee]

Hi @Jaycee_Lewis thanks for the tag!

Hey there @pgeimer,

How I understand this feature is that whenever a contact is created, HubSpot would check the email against the companies in your portal, and create a new one if not found. You'd realize that if you create test@apple.com it will also create Apple as the company and have its logo automatically set. This would mean there is also a global set of data that is constantly scrubbed/updated in HubSpot. 

From a systems standpoint, the delay is natural. Once the contact is created, internally some scripts are running to fetch these data before associating them. Hence you can't do a back-to-back API call. I agree with Jaycee that usually it would be less than 5s based on what I've observed.

To be honest I've not done an implementation similar to yours, but I suggest a 5s delay to be safe. Or if you'd want to be completely safe about it, maybe do a 2s poll to ensure there's always going to be a result.

Cheers
WL

[pgeimer]

Hi @weiliang_lee , thank you for your answer!

Does this mean as soon as there is a "associations" property on the contact that I can stop the poll? Or is it possible that there is a empty "associations" property and the HubSpot System is still searching for associations?

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hi, @pgeimer 👋 Thanks for the question. There isn't a public document that details the exact delay interval to be expected. I found comments from other community managers and the product team that the goal is to keep it < 5s, but this isn't an official document.

Hey, @weiliang_lee, do you have any thoughts here? Aside from accounting for the delay and setting up some form of retrying, what other creative ways can we think about this? 

Best,

Jaycee