Text Message - send SMS http://textmessage.ie/blog blog regarding development of SMS gateway service from Hostingireland.ie Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:48:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 Entering a new line into an SMS message http://textmessage.ie/blog/entering-a-new-line-into-an-sms-message/155 http://textmessage.ie/blog/entering-a-new-line-into-an-sms-message/155#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:48:12 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=155 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/entering-a-new-line-into-an-sms-message/155/feed 0 New Feature! Low SMS credits warning system. http://textmessage.ie/blog/new-feature-low-sms-credits-warning-system/151 http://textmessage.ie/blog/new-feature-low-sms-credits-warning-system/151#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:18:25 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=151 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/new-feature-low-sms-credits-warning-system/151/feed 0 Multiple IP protection http://textmessage.ie/blog/multiple-ip-protection/146 http://textmessage.ie/blog/multiple-ip-protection/146#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:27:59 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=146 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/multiple-ip-protection/146/feed 0 Example form using the SMS API http://textmessage.ie/blog/example-form-using-the-sms-api/137 http://textmessage.ie/blog/example-form-using-the-sms-api/137#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:47:46 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=137 Below is a form submitted by a user of the SMS API (the username and password have been removed from the form of course). But when I saw this form, I thought it would be quite a useful example, to demostrate how simple the API can be interacted with.

<html>
    <head>
        <title>SMS Sender</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>
            <form action=https://sms.hostingireland.ie method=get>
                <table border=0>
                    <tr>
                        <td>To:</td>
                        <input type=hidden name=username value=USERNAME>
                        <input type=hidden name=password value=PASSWORD>
                        <td><input type=text name=to></td>
                    </tr>
                    <tr>
                        <td>Message:</td>
                        <td>
                        <textarea name=message width=25 height=5>Test Message.
                        </textarea>
                    </td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td></td>
                    <td>
                        <input type=submit value=Send>
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </form>
        </p>
    </body>
</html>

I hope this helps interested users see how quickly the API can be connected to, as always, if you have any questions or would like to send me any feedback, either comment below or submit a post on our Forum

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/example-form-using-the-sms-api/137/feed 0 Undocumented gateway response codes http://textmessage.ie/blog/undocumented-gateway-response-codes/133 http://textmessage.ie/blog/undocumented-gateway-response-codes/133#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:57:18 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=133 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/undocumented-gateway-response-codes/133/feed 0 International SMS numbers http://textmessage.ie/blog/international-sms-numbers/86 http://textmessage.ie/blog/international-sms-numbers/86#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:50:01 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=86 To send a text message via the Hosting Ireland SMS API to an international number, the number needs to be formatted in such a way that the gateway knows how to route the message.

If the number was being sent to a UK number (country code +44), and the number itself was 07832165422 then the international number would be formatted as:
447832165422

This same format should work throughout all the mobile networks, but if any mobile networks report a problem with the number, then you can try the following formats as well:
00447832165422,
+447832165422

If you have any questions, or would like to contact me regarding this or any other articles here, please reply below, or post in the forum or email us at smsapi@hostingireland.ie.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/international-sms-numbers/86/feed 0 Non alphanumeric characters http://textmessage.ie/blog/sms-non-alpha-numeric-characters/78 http://textmessage.ie/blog/sms-non-alpha-numeric-characters/78#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:42:57 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=78 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/sms-non-alpha-numeric-characters/78/feed 0 multiple text messages http://textmessage.ie/blog/multiple-text-messages/71 http://textmessage.ie/blog/multiple-text-messages/71#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:11:00 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=71 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/multiple-text-messages/71/feed 2 Credit Balance Request Command http://textmessage.ie/blog/credit-balance-request-command/65 http://textmessage.ie/blog/credit-balance-request-command/65#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 11:44:39 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=65 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.

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/credit-balance-request-command/65/feed 0 Common API Responses http://textmessage.ie/blog/common-api-responses/54 http://textmessage.ie/blog/common-api-responses/54#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:24:48 +0000 admin http://textmessage.ie/blog/?p=54 Please find below a list of the most common API error responses, and possible reasons and corrections for them.

A response is defined as an error when the code is not 1, as result code 1 denotes an SMS succesfully delivered to the numbers network.

Message: Missing Required Fields Code: 501

Notes: This message means that the gateway did not receive enough information for an attempted delivery to be possible, this will occur when any of username, password, to and message are not supplied, if these are all sent, check that they are being sent as lowercase fields.

Message: Invalid Authentication Data Code: 502

Notes: This message means that either your submitted username was not found in the accounts, or the password supplied did not match the password for the username you sent. This would generally caused by invalid details, but these fields are case-sensitive, so check you sent them in the correct case.

Message: Insufficient Balance Code: 503

Notes: This message will only occur after you are succesfully logged into your account, and means that you do not have sufficient credits to send an SMS, this can only be corrected by topping up your credits balance.

Message: Invalid Recipient Code: 504

Notes: This error means that a problem was detected with the recipient number, most commonly caused by non-numeric characters in the to value.

Message: Error retrieving From Value Code: 511

Notes: This is an issue with the API, if this error is encountered an admin should be notified, along with the result ID.

There are other error messages that can be encountered, but it is unlikely that these will ever happen, if you do get an error that isn’t documented, and you are not sure what it means, please contact us, and we will help you understand the message.

As usual, you can contact us by commenting on these posts, in our forum, or by email to smsapi@hostingireland.ie

]]> http://textmessage.ie/blog/common-api-responses/54/feed 0