Creating Polls

Polls ask your audience to let everyone know how they feel or what they think. The REST API has two types of polls: text variants and image variants. A poll is made up a question and a list of options. Options are limited from 2–4 entries. Image polls must have an image associated with each option.

Create a Poll

All widgets are created as part of a Program and each program has its own unique ID. To send a poll widget, a new one must first be created within the program that your audience will be interacting with. When creating a poll, the program_id, question, and options body parameters are required.

# Configure your Program ID
program_id = "your-program-id"

# Set up authorization headers using your API access token
headers = {'Authorization': f'Bearer {access_token}'} 
           
# Create a new image poll  widget
payload = {
  'program_id': program_id,
  'question': "Is this Eli's last game with the giants?",
  'options': [
    {
      'image_url': 'https://example.com/yes.png',
      'description': "For sure! He's done."
    },
    {
      'image_url': 'https://example.com/no.png',
      'description': "He still has a lot left in the tank!"
    }
  ]
}
r = requests.post('https://cf-blast.livelikecdn.com/api/v1/image-polls/', json=payload, headers=headers)
poll = r.json()

Once a widget is created, it will appear in the Pending section of the Producer Studio, but users won't see it yet. A widget has to be published before an audience will see it.

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Check out Polls API reference

More details on reading polls and creating polls is available in the API reference.

Publish the Poll

Widgets get published according to the program schedule. Every widget has a schedule_url field that can be called to update the schedule. The schedule works by setting a delay on a widget, and once the delay is reached the widget gets published. If you want to publish a widget immediately, use a delay of zero. Here is how you would immediately publish the widget created earlier:

# Schedule the widget to publish immediately
publish_payload = {'publish_delay': 'P0DT0S'}
requests.put(poll['schedule_url'], json=publish_payload, headers=headers)

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Specify publish delays in ISO format

The publish_delay body parameter is specified in ISO 8601 duration format.

Once the widget is published, it will appear in the History tab in the Producer Studio, and audiences will see it on their devices if they are subscribed to the program.

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More info is in the API reference!

Please see the Using Widgets section of the API reference documentation for more details about how widgets are created and published.

Poll Variations

The REST API supports two poll variants, text polls and image polls. They function mostly identically, except for these key differences:

• Image poll and text poll are two separate API resources
• Image poll options require an image_url field that text poll options do not have