O365 REST API clarification

Question

I'm trying to work out what I'm doing wrong. I'm trying to get all the contacts from O365 in a XML or JSON format so I started looking into it and found out that Microsoft has a API which will return the data in JSON (perfect!).

The API is accessible at: https://outlook.office365.com/api/v1.0/me/contacts I opened the link in a browser, and all was OK, except that it only returns the first 10 contacts. I do not need this to be incorporated into any kind of software or program or anything I just need to get it trough the browser. Am I missing something or is there any other way how I can get all the contacts flushed in a very basic format?

Thanks for any tip.

Answer 1

The default for the API is to return only 10 entries per request. You can increase this up to 50. For larger result sets you have to use paging. http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/office365/APi/complex-types-for-mail-contacts-calendar#UseODataqueryparametersPageresults

So in the browser, you could do: https://outlook.office365.com/api/v1.0/me/contacts/$count

That would tell you how many total you have. Then you can grab the first 50: https://outlook.office365.com/api/v1.0/me/contacts?$top=50

If you have more, you can grab the next 50 with the $skip parameter: https://outlook.office365.com/api/v1.0/me/contacts?$top=50&$skip=50

And so on.