Working With The Authorize.net Customer Information Manager (CIM), Part 1: Overview
I’m going to spend several posts discussing authorize.net’s Customer Information Manager, a Web service for storing and retrieving personally identifiable information about the people who place credit card orders on your Web site.
Today, I’m focusing solely on an overview of CIM: What it is, how it works, why it works that way, and approaches to integrating CIM into your custom storefront / ordering systems. In future posts, I will discuss actual implementation via PHP and MySQL; my intent is to use 2-3 posts to cover the process, but it may take more or less. My intent is to post every day, but there may be a delay of a day or two between posts.
(I’m uncertain on the number and timing of posts on this topic because I’ll be blogging about implementation as I implement CIM for the first time. And lest that gives you pause, I’ve extensively reviewed the documentation, tested the basics of using the service, and have over 10 years’ experience with PHP / XML / MySQL. And because I’m doing the actual implementation for pay, I will have extensively tested the solution for elegance, reliability and security.)
What Is A Web Service?
The Customer Information Manager is a Web service. In its most common implementation on the World Wide Web, you send a Web service an XML document describing information you want, and the service responds with an XML document that contains the information you requested. (Not all Web services work this way; there are many kinds of Web services out there. But rather than bog down the point, let’s stick with this basic description.)
We can therefore think of a Web service as a remote database; the Customer Information Manager Web service is, in fact, a way to get data into and out of a remote database.
In the case of a Web service, rather than connecting to a local database, writing a SQL query and asking it to send us a result set (or Boolean false on failure), such as we would do in PHP / MySQL, we instead write an XML document that provides our authentication credentials and describes the data we want, send that to the CIM Web service via cUrl (or, if your server allows it, fopen), and get back from the CIM an XML document that contains the records we want (or an error code describing any problems encountered).
In other words, for most intents and purposes, the CIM Web service works exactly like a database, only different. So why in the world does authorize.net bother with a Web service, rather than simply giving you access to their database directly?
Shortening URLs With The bit.ly API Via ASP.NET
After yesterday’s post on using the Twitter API to post status updates on Twitter from an ASP.NET application, a follower of my client suggested using a URL shortening service to link to the articles headlines being posted as tweets.
That was an excellent idea of which I should have thought in the first place. And thanks to the extreme simplicity of the REST-like bit.ly API, shortening URLs is as simple as sending a request URL laced with querystring variables.
So here is a quick and simple ASP.NET subroutine, written in VB.NET, to shorten URLs with the bit.ly API:
Sub BitlyIt(ByVal strUser As String, ByVal strAPIKey As String, ByVal strLongUrl As String)
'This subroutine requires your page to have a label control named lblStatus
'build URL to shorten method resource
Dim strUri As New StringBuilder("http://api.bit.ly/shorten?")
strUri.Append("version=2.0.1")
'we want to get an XML response back from bit.ly, not the default JSON
strUri.Append("&format=xml")
strUri.Append("&longUrl=")
strUri.Append(Server.HtmlEncode(strLongUrl))
strUri.Append("&login=")
strUri.Append(Server.HTMLEncode(strUser))
strUri.Append("&apiKey=")
strUri.Append(Server.HTMLEncode(strAPIKey))
'create request for shorten resource
Dim objRequest As HttpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create(strUri.ToString())
'since we are passing querystring variables, our method is get
objRequest.Method = "GET"
'act as though we are sending a form
objRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
'don't wait for a 100 Continue HTTP response from bit.ly
objRequest.ServicePoint.Expect100Continue = False
'since we are using get, we need not send a request body; set content-length to 0
objRequest.ContentLength = 0
'we need to capture the XML being sent in response
'read the response into a new XML document
Dim objResponse As WebResponse = objRequest.GetResponse()
Dim objXML As New XmlDocument()
objXML.Load(objResponse.GetResponseStream())
'the response will have three node values we're primarily interested in
'the errorCode node will contain a numeric error code; 0 means success
Dim nErrorCode As XmlNode = objXML.SelectSingleNode("//errorCode")
'if there was an error, the errorMessage node will contain a user-friendly message useful for debugging
Dim nErrorMsg As XmlNode = objXML.SelectSingleNode("//errorMessage")
'if all went well, shortUrl will contain the full short URL created for our link
Dim nShortUrl As XmlNode = objXML.SelectSingleNode("//shortUrl")
'if we didn't get an errorCode value of 0, there was a problem; report the user-friendly message
'on success, report the short URL for our resource
If nErrorCode.InnerText <> "0" Then
lblStatus.Text = "Error returned. Code: " & nErrorCode.InnerText & "; Message: " & nErrorMsg.InnerText
Else
lblStatus.Text = nShortUrl.InnerText
End If
End Sub
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