1 Accepted solution
COS Blog Post API - Invalid Json error creating a new post?
SOLVEThanks for your help Peter: gave me the nudge needed to look beyond the JSON body itself, and see the error I was making.
I’m using NodeJS & initially the request NPM module ( link ) to manage the request, and had the following code (where the variable “post” contains the JSON object string shared above)… Highlighted my mistake with ** (embarrassingly… 
) :
var request = require('request');
var failedPosts = [];
var savePost = function(post) {
var apiEndpoint = "https://api.hubapi.com/content/api/v2/blog-posts?hapikey=REDACTED";
**var options = {**
url: apiEndpoint,
json: true,
body: post
};
**request.post(apiEndpoint, post, function(err, response, body) {**
if (response.statusCode != 201) {
console.log("Failed to save: " + post.name);
console.log("----body dump-----------");
console.log(body);
console.log("----response dump----");
console.log(response);
console.log("-------------------------------");
failedPosts.push(post.name);
return false;
}
return true;
});
};
The error message HubSpot was returning in the response then led me to focus on the JSON object I was sending within the request, and as a result I didn’t even think it could be something else.
I re-wrote the block of code from scratch using the needle NPM library instead (which I’ve not used before, so forced me to cross reference the code), and realised that I wasn’t passing the options variable into the request.post() function first time round.
Initially I wasn’t using the options variable, and did have malformed json (didn’t pass validation checks, the import file I was reading from used single quotes, rather than double, to define properties) which is how this happened. I read in another thread here that single could cause character escaping issues, so completely focused on the request body itself, rather than looking at the code as a whole.
I’m assuming that the error I was getting was because the headers weren’t set correctly to application/json? If that’s it, it would be great to have either something added to the docs explaining what could cause this error message, or alternatively have a separate error message for each?
Thought the feedback there could help: ironically if I had no error message at all (just knew that it failed), I probably would have spotted it quickly!
Here’s the final working code, for reference, if it helps in any way:
var failedPosts = [];
var savePost = function(post) {
var apiEndpoint = "https://api.hubapi.com/content/api/v2/blog-posts?hapikey=**redacted**";
writeToLog("saved-posts.json", "\n" + post + " \n");
var options = {
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json"
}
};
needle.post(apiEndpoint, post, options, function(err, response) {
if (response.statusCode != 201) {
console.log("Failed to import: " + post.name);
console.log("----response---------");
console.log(response);
console.log("----end response-----");
failedPosts.push(post.name);
return false;
}
console.log("Successfully imported:" + post.name);
return true;
});
};
Thanks a million. A good lesson learned for me too about making assumptions!
When I’ve tied this migration project up and have some time, I’ll tidy up the code and publish it to Github: could be a useful tool for people trying to migrate any blog to the HubSpot COS. I used the free apifier.com API to scrape all the blog posts from the site (using jQuery selectors to find the relevant properties on each page), converted the output into the JSON HubSpot expects, then looped through those (with a brief wait between each request to prevent breaking the request limit thresholds).
Could even be an interesting way to approach an additional HubSpot blog import tool, that encourages more people with well established (non-Wordpress) blogs to get that content into HubSpot, rather than just installing the tracking code 
.png "HubSpot Employee"){kind=icon}
COS Blog Post API - Invalid Json error creating a new post?
SOLVEThanks for your help Peter: gave me the nudge needed to look beyond the JSON body itself, and see the error I was making.
I’m using NodeJS & initially the request NPM module ( link ) to manage the request, and had the following code (where the variable “post” contains the JSON object string shared above)… Highlighted my mistake with ** (embarrassingly… ) :
var request = require('request');
var failedPosts = [];
var savePost = function(post) {
var apiEndpoint = "https://api.hubapi.com/content/api/v2/blog-posts?hapikey=REDACTED";
**var options = {**
url: apiEndpoint,
json: true,
body: post
};
**request.post(apiEndpoint, post, function(err, response, body) {**
if (response.statusCode != 201) {
console.log("Failed to save: " + post.name);
console.log("----body dump-----------");
console.log(body);
console.log("----response dump----");
console.log(response);
console.log("-------------------------------");
failedPosts.push(post.name);
return false;
}
return true;
});
};
The error message HubSpot was returning in the response then led me to focus on the JSON object I was sending within the request, and as a result I didn’t even think it could be something else.
I re-wrote the block of code from scratch using the needle NPM library instead (which I’ve not used before, so forced me to cross reference the code), and realised that I wasn’t passing the options variable into the request.post() function first time round.
Initially I wasn’t using the options variable, and did have malformed json (didn’t pass validation checks, the import file I was reading from used single quotes, rather than double, to define properties) which is how this happened. I read in another thread here that single could cause character escaping issues, so completely focused on the request body itself, rather than looking at the code as a whole.
I’m assuming that the error I was getting was because the headers weren’t set correctly to application/json? If that’s it, it would be great to have either something added to the docs explaining what could cause this error message, or alternatively have a separate error message for each?
Thought the feedback there could help: ironically if I had no error message at all (just knew that it failed), I probably would have spotted it quickly!
Here’s the final working code, for reference, if it helps in any way:
var failedPosts = [];
var savePost = function(post) {
var apiEndpoint = "https://api.hubapi.com/content/api/v2/blog-posts?hapikey=**redacted**";
writeToLog("saved-posts.json", "\n" + post + " \n");
var options = {
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json"
}
};
needle.post(apiEndpoint, post, options, function(err, response) {
if (response.statusCode != 201) {
console.log("Failed to import: " + post.name);
console.log("----response---------");
console.log(response);
console.log("----end response-----");
failedPosts.push(post.name);
return false;
}
console.log("Successfully imported:" + post.name);
return true;
});
};
Thanks a million. A good lesson learned for me too about making assumptions!
When I’ve tied this migration project up and have some time, I’ll tidy up the code and publish it to Github: could be a useful tool for people trying to migrate any blog to the HubSpot COS. I used the free apifier.com API to scrape all the blog posts from the site (using jQuery selectors to find the relevant properties on each page), converted the output into the JSON HubSpot expects, then looped through those (with a brief wait between each request to prevent breaking the request limit thresholds).
Could even be an interesting way to approach an additional HubSpot blog import tool, that encourages more people with well established (non-Wordpress) blogs to get that content into HubSpot, rather than just installing the tracking code
