Sometimes it will be neccessary for your text messages to carry a newline to break up content. In order to do this you will need to send a url escaped carriage return character, followed by a url escaped line feed character.
Please find the particular url escaped string below:
%0D%0A
%0D is the carriage return.
%0A is the line feed.
If you have any questions on this, please let us know, either by mail to smsapi@hostingireland.ie or on our forum or comment below.
admin text messages development special characters
A new feature has now been built into the SMS gateway, allowing you to specify a contact email address for the sms Gateway and a threshold amount of SMS credits for your account.
Currently this contact email address can be used with a lower threshold of SMS credits, and once the credits in your accounts goes below or matches the threshold the gateway will send a mail to the contact address, alerting that the credits are running low in your account. However, this will only be sent the first time you run low, and will not be sent again until your credits have been above threshold again.
This feature will ensure that your account will never run to 0. This feature is disabled for all existing accounts, so if you want this alert feature enabled, please email me your email address and threshold requirements to smsapi@hostingireland.ie and I will enable this feature for you.
As always, if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions, you can comment below, post on our forum or send an email to smsapi@hostingireland.ie.
admin sms charges, text messages development new features, SMS API, sms charges
After a suggestion from a user of our gateway, a change has been made to the security module on our gateway, that limits connections by user to a particular IP.
The request was to allow multiple IPs per user, so that several computers can connect to the same account, allowing good security, without lacking usability.
The security module was successfully modified, and now allows several IPs to be authentic for a single user account.
If you would like extra IPs to be added to your accounts security module, send us an email to smsapi@textmessage.ie with the request.
If you have any suggestions for modifications to the API or ways which it could be improved or altered to suit your needs, submit a suggestion in our forum, and if it is feasable we will get to work on it straight away.
admin SMS gateway API developement, text messages development SMS gateway, text messages development
Occasionally the gateway will respond with a response code that is not documented in our site’s Common API responses.
When this happens the response will be coming directly from the mobile network provider rather than generated from our own gateway, as such this is not something that can be documented.
However, these response codes almost always resolve to the phone number you are trying to send an SMS to, check you are using the correct number, and if it is international number, be sure to take a look at the article on International SMS numbers.
As always, if you have any questions please comment below, or register on our forum.
admin SMS gateway API developement, text messages development error messages, result codes, SMS API, SMS gateway, text messages development, xml
When a request to send an SMS is received by our gateway, it is processed by HTTP and some characters can commonly cause errors, which may lead to unpredictable results from your request.
To correct this issue, you should urlencode the message you want to send, so that the HTTP does not interfere with the message, this involves re-writing the message with characters such as & (ampersand) and # (hash) replaced with %23, %26 and so on. If your SMS program is written using PHP, there is a prebuilt function for performing this, which you can see here:
http://ie2.php.net/urlencode
It is important however, that you initially change spaces to ‘+’ before url encoding the message.
As usual, if you have any questions regarding this technology, or anything related to the Hosting Ireland SMS Gateway API, either comment below, or in our forum or email smsapi@hostingireland.ie.
admin text messages development SMS API, special characters, text messages development
It is possible to send a text message through the hosting ireland SMS gateway, which is more than one text long, the gateway will automatically split the message into multiple texts and send them seperately to the receiver, where they will be restructured into a single long text message on the receivers phone.
The gateway will automatically charge for the extra messages used as well, so there is no need to worry about using over your quota of messages.
The longest message the gateway can handle is 4 seperate messages, or 640 characters.
If you have any questions, please either comment on this post, or post on our forum, and we will reply as quickly as we can.
admin sms charges, text messages development cost, long texts, multiple texts, SMS API
A request sent to the SMS API with correct Authentication details can now request its current balance, using the new Action property.
A sample request is displayed below:
http://sms.hostingireland.ie/?username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&action=creditrequest
The usual error messages, documented here apply, as well as a new XML response code, the response code is 101, which implies a succesful credit query, and will also have a log entry ID. an example reply is found below:
<smsapi>
<result code="101" id="cdaef13616e100fcd9fb80ef15a886ff">561</result>
</smsapi>
This response code can now be used to check for sufficient credits before attempting to send a bulk of SMS messages, this will help prevent issues with your local sending code, and also reduce the load on the SMS API server.
As usual, you can send any feedback on this to smsapi@hostingireland.ie or send a post in our forum.
admin SMS gateway API developement, text messages development credit request, SMS API, text messages development
It has become neccessary to have logs available to users, so that messages sent through our SMS gateway can be investigated in the future.
With this in mind a new feature has been added to the the API, you can now request logs of your messages, using the URL:
http://sms.hostingireland.ie/logRequest/?username=accountName&password=accountPassword[&messageId=messageId]
If messageId is not presented, you will be given the logs for the last 100 (or all if the total is less than or equal to 100) connections from your account.
These logs are presented in XML 1.0 format, and you can see an example log below:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<logList>
<log messageId="b7c10d6cbfe5496ec16acda8d0a187d0">
<entry date="2009-04-21 13:15:27">logged in.</entry>
<entry date="2009-04-21 13:15:27">999 SMS credits Left.</entry>
<entry date="2009-04-21 13:15:27">to: 08fgh1414</entry>
<entry date="2009-04-21 13:15:27">message: test</entry>
<entry date="2009-04-21 13:15:27">from: 1890987000</entry>
<entry date="2009-04-21 13:15:27">send result: Invalid Destination Address</entry>
</log>
</logList>
If the requested logfile is not in your account, or your login details are incorrect you will receive an error notifying you of the failure to receive a logList, you will also receive an error if you do not yet have any logs for any actions for your account.
Any comments on the logging system or the format of the XML should be entered through our forum, or in reply to this post.
admin SMS gateway API developement, text messages development logs, SMS API, text messages development, xml
For easier usage in automated implemenations the responses from the SMS gateway API will now be returned in XML 1.0.
An example response is below:
<smsapi>
<result code="503" id="8dbcbdf843c817eed5f8898066184412">
INSUFFICIENT BALANCE
</result>
</smsapi>
This allows the response to be collected by an XML object and used more dynamic usage than the original error text.
If you have any comments on the XML response codes implementation, please send any information to us, either in our forum or in response to this post.
admin SMS gateway API developement, text messages development SMS API, SMS gateway, text messages development, xml
An application making automated use of Hostingireland’s SMS gateway via the provided API on sms.hostingireland.ie sent just short of one hundred SMS through the gateway today, using an automated contact script.
After a painless time changing the existing code from its existing SMS provider, to Hostingirelands SMS gateway API code, the script was error checked and ready to run.
The results were most pleasing, all the SMS send requests were received by the Gateway correctly and every SMS directed to a valid phone number was received.
Processing the request took just over 1 minute to send all of the SMS to the recipients.
admin SMS gateway API developement, text messages development