Unable to create poll for an event session: "The poll contains advanced poll questions"

API and Webhooks
,
1

I attempting to create a very simple poll for a session event but I keep getting this error from the Zoom API: The poll contains advanced poll questions. Here an example of the request I send as well as the response I get:

REQUEST:
PUT https://api.zoom.us/v2/zoom_events/events/H_VCEULlQi2Wg4_0Bmcl_w/sessions/JMWkCJDDQgy7fvrLxkfsPQ/polls
{
  "polls": [
    {
      "title": "ZoomNet Integration Testing: Poll",
      "poll_type": 1,
      "status": "active",
      "anonymous": false,
      "questions": [
        {
          "answers": [
            "C#",
            "JavaScript",
            "Python"
          ],
          "name": "What is your favorite programming language?",
          "show_as_dropdown": true,
          "type": "single"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

RESPONSE:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 13:04:55 GMT
x-zm-trackingid: WEB_29a6121938e0f5e280d5a729719577b2

{"code":400, "message":"The poll contains advanced poll questions"}

After a lot of trial/error I figured out that the source of this problem is "show_as_dropdown": true. If I change this Boolean to false, my request completes successfully as you can see in the sample below:

REQUEST:
PUT https://api.zoom.us/v2/zoom_events/events/cM6uSa2-SBaPHQBK3xhuhg/sessions/Q1c9u3M2R--ZGCqdM2Y9Cw/polls
{
  "polls": [
  {
    "title": "ZoomNet Integration Testing: Poll",
    "poll_type": 1,
    "status": "active",
    "anonymous": false,
    "questions": [
        {
          "answers": [
            "C#",
            "JavaScript",
            "Python"
          ],
          "name": "What is your favorite programming language?",
          "show_as_dropdown": false,
          "type": "single"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

RESPONSE:
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:26:31 GMT
x-zm-trackingid: WEB_c8dc138792a98853e417ad73c50c5f5d

The documentation states that this value defaults to false but there is no indication that true is an invalid value.

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1 Like
2

hi @desautelsj ,

That is a good catch. Thank you for being part of this forum.

As a non Zoom Employee I am free to say that the documentation is not at a quality level I would accept. The API moves so fast, the docs are not keeping up and on behalf of the community sorry and thankyou.

Personally I have had to build a playground for the API’s I am using in projects.
And learn these acceptions. And sometimes wierd behaivour cna be seen as differnt engineers could have setup each API. Often this playing can bring benefits too. its not all bad!

What you have called out is a good example of somehitng that should be highlighed as a breaking parameter. Although the errror message is tyring to hint where the issue is.

I have a meeting this week where I can highlight this. I think show_as_frop_down needs to be required ???

all the best

John Drinkwater
I am also tyring to do some advanced things with polls and reponses.

3

Hi John,

What I found is not that the documentation fails to indicate show_as_dropdown as being required. The issue I found is that true doesn’t seem to be an acceptable value for this boolean field.

Thanks for chiming in, looking forward to chatting with you during our next MVP meeting.

1 Like
4

Thanks @desautelsj and @expertswho
I will bring this up to our Engineering team and I will make sure to address this issue (ZSEE-173975)

6

Hey @desautelsj
I have an update for this issue
Our Engineering team was able to reproduce this error, and it seems that to fix this issue, you will need to pass the poll_type field with value 2, since you are creating an advanced poll. Just changing the type, you will fix this issue

7

I was not aware that having a question show as dropdown = true was considered an “advanced” question which required the poll’s type to be set to 2.

I will make the change. Thank you @elisa.zoom for looking into this.

8

I just tested it and can confirm that changing the poll type to "advanced (i.e.: poll_type=2), solves the problem.

Having said that, I found another scenario that triggers the same “poll contains advanced questions” error. I tried creating a poll with a required question (i.e.: answer_required=true) and it failed with the same error message. Changing the poll type to 2 solved this problem.

Are there other scenarios that require the poll type to be set to 2?

1 Like