Surveymonkey API: check if a specific email has completed survey

Question

I have a large amount of users (over 400k) that have been sent a survey to complete. As part of logging into my site I'm using the surveymonkey api to check to see if they completed their assigned survey. I'm keying on email address. I'm thinking of using: https://developer.surveymonkey.com/mashery/get_respondent_list

however, I don't want to page through all 400k users to find a specific email - anyway to do this search more efficiently?

Using django backend to ping the surveymonkey api

Answer 1

get_respondent_list allows you to search for respondents by modified date/time range. For 400K respondents, you should store the results in a local database and only query the API when the email address you're looking for isn't found locally.

To avoid having to parse the whole list every time, you should only get new respondents since the last time your checked using that date/time range feature and add the new respondents to your DB. There is some example code which illustrates polling for new respondents based on date/time range on SurveyMonkey's public GitHub here:

https://github.com/SurveyMonkey/python_guides/blob/master/guides/polling.py