BOS Rest Service - PHP example - Public

Introduction

This is a quick and easy example of how to use the BOS Rest services in PHP. It is by no means production worthy and is just a very simple example that returns the telephone number of the queried BOS user. There is no error handling etc.

Assumptions

The example assumes the following:

The base url is http://bos2.bulletinwireless.net/newrest/REST/BOS/Customer/username/.
A valid BOS user is being queried.
A valid authorised BOS user is making the query.
The PHP script is located at http://webmail.bulletin.net/temp/sample.php.

Components

The first component of the example is a very basic HTML form used to submit the BOS user we want to query and the authorised user name and password submitting the query. The source code is below:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>PHP sample using BOS Rest service</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action="http://webmail.bulletin.net/temp/sample.php" method="post">
<p>This quick and easy PHP sample will return the phone number of the BOS username entered.</p> 
<p>Enter the BOS username to query:<br />
<input type="text" name="username" size="50" /></p>
<p>Enter the authorised BOS userid:<br />
<input type="text" name="userid" size="50" /></p>
<p>Enter the password for authorised BOS userid:<br />
<input type="password" name="password" size="50" /></p>
<input type="submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>

The second component of the example is the PHP script. The script does the following:

Gets the username, userid and password from the HTML form.
Builds the url to submit.
Submits the url and gets a response.
Loads the response as an XML string.
Queries the namespace referred to in the returned XML string
Gets all elements in the XML.
Gets and prints the telephone number element.

The source code for the script is below:

<?php
/* the base url */
$base = 'http://bos2.bulletinwireless.net/newrest/REST/BOS/Customer/username/';

/* get the username, userID and password from the HTML form fields */
$username = $_POST['username'];
$params = array('userId' => $_POST['userid'], 'password' => $_POST['password']);
								
/* build the url to submit */								
$url = $base.$username.'?'.http_build_query($params);

/* get the response by submitting the url */
$response = file_get_contents($url);	
							
/* load response as a simpleXML string*/
$results = simplexml_load_string($response);

/* get all elements from namespace ns:2 */
$elems = $results->children("urn:bo.bulletinwireless.com/1.1");

/* get the telephoneNumber element */
$elemsphone = $elems->telephoneNumber;

/* print the phone number for the queried BOS userId */
echo "The phone number for BOS user ".$username." is ".$elemsphone;

?>

Try it.

To try the example enter a valid BOS username to query, a valid BOS userid making the query and password for the userid, then click the submit button.

You should see a plain page with the following:

The phone number for BOS user (username you entered) is (whatever phone number is)