Direct Post Handler and REST API Methods

All REST calls to Aria’s System Services API consist of HTTP client requests made to the base URL:

https://secure.ariasystems.net/api/w...dispatcher.php

These requests may be made with either POST or GET HTTP methods. Aria suggests using the POST method as it affords more security when passing authentication information like <client_no> or <auth_key>. The actual web service method call is defined in the HTTP query string as follows:

https://secure.ariasystems.net/api/w...dispatcher.php?rest_call=method_name&parameter1=val&parameter2=val&parameter3=val…

There is a distinction between the REST and SOAP versions of any Aria API call that accepts input array data. The WSDL file used for SOAP calls defines complex data types such as multi-column rows of data like a row set retrieved from a database query.

REST calls in Aria’s API do not use XML files to define input variables. This means that Aria REST API calls are limited to passing in single dimensional arrays of pipe (“|”) separated data as values for named variables in an HTTP request. Multidimensional input arrays in REST are therefore defined as multiple single dimensional arrays of a unique data type where each array forms one column in a row as follows:      

Input String_array  &parameter1=this|is|an|array|of|strings
Input double_array  &parameter2=1.0|2|3.25|4|5.1|6
Input integer_array &parameter3=1|2|3|4|5|6  

Aria’s REST servers perform a method call validation on all REST calls. This feature allows the web service client programmer to simply POST or GET an HTTP request to our servers and the servers will make sure that the request is proper without any extra XML parsing on either the client or server sides. In this way, you can simply specify a URL to one of Aria’s services and that HTTP request will provide you all the client validation you would expect from a fully defined WSDL backed SOAP call, without any of the SOAP overhead.