Question

I’m using the CreateSend API gem, and in my local dev environment I am able to successfully create a draft campaign.

In production (staging), on Heroku, the exact same code instead returns with an error:

310: HTML Content URL Required

I am definitely passing the HTML content URL, as well as all the other required arguments to Campaign.create (I’ve visually verified the fact by logging the variables). Here’s the API call:

cm_campaign_id = CreateSend::Campaign.create client_id, subject, name, from_name, from_email, reply_to, html_url, text_url, list_ids, segment_ids

Furthermore, in local dev the API call returns in less than 3 seconds, whereas on Heroku it times out for 30 seconds and returns that error.

Why is this happening on Heroku?

Answer 1

Because their API requires a second request to your app to happen in the middle of a first ongoing request, I suggest you move the logic off to a worker process:

1. the request to your app that creates a campaign does not talk to Campaign Monitor, instead it just creates a job in a table, and redirects to a page that checks the status of that job
2. a worker dyno sees the job and starts working on it, posting to the Campaign Monitor API… because this is not a web dyno, it’s not a problem for it to wait
3. the CM API will then request the newsletter pages and respond back to the worker dyno
4. the worker dyno can then update the status of the job
5. all the while, the page you redirected to in the first step can continue refreshing itself polling the job’s status, and show the final page once it notices the job has completed.