This article defines the preliminary steps and recommended approaches for integrating with Informz.
Assumptions
Informz has made the following assumptions about the skill set of our partner’s developers:
- Developers have a working knowledge of web services
- Developers have a working knowledge of XML
Setup
Here are the steps you will need to go through to set-up your environment to work with Informz:
- Ensure that your firewall will allow a connection to Informz’s web service. (Informz’s IP is 66.192.199.137)
- You will need to provide us with a list or range of IP addresses that your API requests will originate from. We will add those to a list of allowed IP addresses during the brand creation process.
- Get your Informz brand ID and brand name from your Informz eMarketing Advisor.
- Decide if you will employ encryption.
- If no, then a user name and password will be established in the brand.
- If yes, Informz will provide you with an encryption key.
Development Approach
Before integrating with Informz, we recommend that you approach your development in the following manner.
- Create a basic web service client that can establish a connection.
- Implement compression and authentication. (Authentication requires a user name and password in the brand you are working with.)
- Implement a GridRequest message.
- Add the implementation of encryption. (Coordinate with Informz around the setup of the encryption key.)
- Test the updated encryption implementation with the GridRequest message.
- Implement the balance of the messages needed for your purposes.
Test Environment
You will be able to test your work via our public interface, located here: https://partnertest.informz.net/aapi/InformzService.svc
Moving to Production
Once development and testing are complete, the final step is to move the work to production. Here are the steps you will have to perform to do this:
- Change the endpoint url to point to one of the following locations:
- For the US: https://partner.informz.net/aapi/InformzService.svc (rather than partnertest)
- For Canada: https://partner.informz.ca/aapi/InformzService.svc
- Create user account in Informz if this is different than what was used during development. This can be done either by a single Informz account used for all calls, or existing user credentials can be passed in to support auditing of the messages.