Over the last couple of days I have been digging into the ZoomInfo API (using C# – ASP.Net) to first of all better understand the API and secondly to leverage the data provided in order to use it for things like company profiling, competitors, and key contacts at a given company.
The ZoomInfo API gives you the ability to:
- Search for any person in the ZoomInfo database by name.
- Search for any company in the ZoomInfo database by name, domain, industry, keyword, geography, or company size.
- Get detailed information such as description, industries, address, stock ticker, key people, mergers and acquisitions, and more on any company in the ZoomInfo database.
- Get a list of competitors for any company in the ZoomInfo database.
Below is a sample URL to make an XML request for the ZoomInfo data:
The “key” has to be generated by concatenating the following parameters:
- First 2 letters of every search term in sequential order (*** Note for the Company Competitors Query, supply the whole CompanyID)
- Your Shared Secret
- Today’s day (not padded with zero)
- Today’s month (not padded with zero)
- Today’s year (4 digit)
Below is a method you can use to generate the MD5 code:
// Create an md5 sum string of this string
public static string ZoomEncode(String str)
{
System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider x = new System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
byte[] bs = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(str);
bs = x.ComputeHash(bs);
System.Text.StringBuilder s = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
foreach (byte b in bs)
{
s.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower());
}
return s.ToString();
}
Below is a method you can use in C# to retrieve the XML provided by the ZoomInfo API. It takes into account the type of request made, for company detail or company competitors:
public static String getCompanyDetail(String companyDomain, String queryType, String companyID)
{
StringBuilder urlBuffer = null;
urlBuffer = new StringBuilder("http://api.zoominfo.com/PartnerAPI/XmlOutput.aspx");
urlBuffer.Append("?query_type=");
if (queryType == "company_detail")
{
urlBuffer.Append("company_detail");
}
if (queryType == "company_competitors")
{
urlBuffer.Append("company_competitors");
}
urlBuffer.Append("&pc=");
urlBuffer.Append(zoomInfoKey);
if (0 != companyID.Length)
{
urlBuffer.Append("&CompanyID=");
urlBuffer.Append(companyID);
}
if (queryType == "company_detail")
{
urlBuffer.Append("&CompanyDomain=");
urlBuffer.Append(companyDomain);
}
String keySeed = "";
if (0 != companyID.Length)
{
keySeed = companyID;
}
else
{
keySeed = companyDomain.Substring(1, 2);
}
keySeed += secret + DateTime.Today.Day + DateTime.Today.Month + DateTime.Today.Year;
urlBuffer.Append("&key=");
urlBuffer.Append(ZoomEncode(keySeed));
try
{
HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(urlBuffer.ToString()) as HttpWebRequest;
request.ContentType = "text/xml;charset="utf-8"";
request.Accept = "text/xml";
request.Method = "GET";
using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
{
using (StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
String temp = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
return temp;
}
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Debug.Write(ex.Message);
}
return String.Empty;
}
