Can I do bulk updates with the microsoft graph API? Specifically contacts

Question

I am using the microsoft graph php sdk to manipulate a user's contacts. I can do CRUD operations on individual contacts, but I am trying to figure out if it is possible to process multiple contacts in a single request. This works fine for adding a single client:

 $graph=new Graph;
 $graph->setAccessToken($token);
 $graph->createRequest('POST', $url)
 ->attachBody($contact)
 ->setReturnType(Contact::class)
 ->execute();

For bulk I tried

 ->attachBody([$contact1, $contact2, $contact3]);

and I get the 400 error:

"code": "BadRequest",
"message": "Empty Payload. JSON content expected.",

I got the same error when trying in graph explorer, POSTing to
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/contacts with this body:

[
  {
    "emailAddresses": [
      {
        "name": "John Doe",
        "address": "jdoe@example.com"
      }
    ],
    "givenName": "John"
  },
  {
    "emailAddresses": [
      {
        "name": "John Doe",
        "address": "jdoe@example.com"
      }
    ],
    "givenName": "John"
  }
]

Is there a way to do this or is it not supported? I couldn't find a mention of it either way in the documentation.

Sometimes I have to add thousands of contacts and doing 1 per request seems tedious.

Same question for all the update operations: post, patch, delete.

Answer 1

Microsoft Graph has a Batching feature specifically for this type of scenario. Each operation is still against a single record, but batching allows you to make one call to execute up to 20 operations:

{
  "requests": [
    {
      "id": "1",
      "method": "POST",
      "url": "/me/contacts",
      "headers":{
         "Content-Type":"application/json"
      },
      "body": {
        "emailAddresses": [
          {
            "name": "John Doe",
            "address": "jdoe@example.com"
          }
        ],
        "givenName": "John"
      }
    },
    {
        "id": "2",
        "method": "POST",
        "url": "/me/contacts",
        "headers":{
           "Content-Type":"application/json"
        },
        "body": {
          "emailAddresses": [
            {
              "name": "John Doe",
              "address": "jdoe@example.com"
            }
          ],
          "givenName": "John"
        }
      },
      {
        "id": "3",
        "method": "POST",
        "url": "/me/contacts",
        "headers":{
           "Content-Type":"application/json"
        },
        "body": {
          "emailAddresses": [
            {
              "name": "John Doe",
              "address": "jdoe@example.com"
            }
          ],
          "givenName": "John"
        }
      }
  ]
}