A number of our clients use DemocracyInAction.org for their CRM and online advocacy needs. One of the more frequent requests we receive is the simple ability to display a counter on a website indicating the number of members in a particular supporter list.

Recently, a client asked us to do just that -- and using a combination of Salsa's new API and some GD trickery provided by the excellent folks at Energy Action, we came up with the following solution:

Here's how we did it:

First, we created a custom report in DIA to return a counter of the supporters for the particular group we were interested in. Then, using Salsa's API, we pulled that number using PHP:

$data=load("https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/rest/report.jsp?report_KEY=1&username=[dia_username]&password=[dia_password]");

This returns an XML file of the supporter list that looks something like this:

<data organization_KEY=\"ORG_ID\">
	<item>
		<Count-supporter_groups.supporter_KEY>1771</Count-supporter_groups.supporter_KEY>
	</item>
</data>

Then, using a few simple XML functions (attached) we parsed that XML into a variable:

$number = GetElementByName($data, \"<Count-supporter_groups.supporter_KEY>\", \"</C
ount-supporter_groups.supporter_KEY>\");

Theoretically, you could stop here and just echo this out -- but in our case, we wanted an embeddable solution that anyone could post on their blog or website. The natural answer was to create an image on-demand that people could simply include in a sidebar or post.