This article provides information about the steps and processes that are necessary in order to set up and develop the Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) Web Service.

Suggested uses

The main anticipated use of the Web Service is to simplify the synchronization of data between Thrive Marketing Professional and another client application. This facilitates the easy transfer of email addresses captured in one environment and then being directed into Thrive Marketing Professional.

In addition to email address, other information about the email recipient can be transferred. For example, first name can be provided so that a mailing can be personalized using that data. Further segmentation of the subscriber base can also occur in Thrive Marketing Professional leveraging this personal information.

Equally important as getting information about those who wish to receive mailings from your organization is to know those people who do not wish to receive mailings from your organization. Lists of unsubscribers can also be sent to Thrive Marketing Professional so that these email addresses can be excluded from future mailings.

Aside from data synchronization, these lists can serve as a starting point for generating reports. There are many GridRequest actions that can be used to retrieve data from Thrive Marketing Professional. This includes information about subscribers as well as the results of any mailing publishing.

Technology overview

Higher Logic has embraced a document-centric approach to SOAP-based web services. This is considered to be a "second generation" approach for web services. There are a number of benefits to this approach that we think will be helpful to you as you develop your integration.

See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-docstyle.html for details.

These benefits include:

Sending a single document (as opposed to making multiple, iterative method calls)
Listening for only the data that you want in a Response document
Avoiding RPC, which is more "fragile" with regard to versioning

All API communication occurs via HTTPS, thereby securing the transmission. The content within each document can also be encrypted to further secure data.

Understand Thrive Marketing Professional

Understanding how Thrive Marketing Professional works will be helpful to you as you begin work on this project. The Informz Partner Relationship Manager will schedule a session (or sessions) in which your team can learn about Thrive Marketing Professional and how it operates. This basic understanding of the Thrive Marketing Professional user interface will help you to test your API.

If you have questions about working with this API, create a case and include your name and any relevant uncompressed XML calls in your message.

API method

There is a single method in the API:

PostInformzMessage (string)

NOTE: The input string parameter should be a fully formed XML document.

Thrive Marketing Professional XML documents

Higher Logic provides two XML documents.

ActionRequest - Use this to have Thrive Marketing Professional perform an action, such as creating and scheduling a mailing (CreateMailing and ScheduleMailing).

<ActionRequest xmlns="http://partner.informz.net/aapi/2009/08/">
<Brand id="9999">Test Brand</Brand>
<User>testuser</User>
   <Actions>
        [Action Details]
   </Actions>
</ActionRequest>

GridRequest - Use this when you want to return tabular data from Thrive Marketing Professional. This could be a list of mailings or a list of recipients who opened a particular mailing.

The GridRequest document retrieves information from Thrive Marketing Professional for use in the partner application. The <DataElement> node provides flexibility to request any available information using the same document format.

<GridRequest xmlns="http://partner.informz.net/aapi/2009/08/">
<Brand id="9999">Test Brand</Brand>
<User>testuser</User>
   <Grids>
        [Grid Details]
   </Grids>
</GridRequest>

Document notes

All documents must include the Brand ID, Brand Name, and User.
Brand ID and User are validated when the document is received.

Brand ID is validated against the IP address that is stored with the brand to ensure that it is a valid origin point for the brand.
User is validated against a known user list in Thrive Marketing Professional.

Brand Name is used for logging purposes only.

Document case sensitivity and node order

The document tags are case sensitive. Make sure that the casing of the letters is respected between the calling application and the API.

EXAMPLE: <BulkUpload> is correct; <bulkupload> is not correct.

NOTE: The comparison of string values in a Grid Request is not case sensitive.

The order in which the nodes are presented in an XML document is determined by the XSD (XML Schema Definition).

Use the example messages that are provided, as well as the graphical depiction of the XSD, to ensure that the order in which the nodes are presented (in the documents being submitted to the API) matches the order as found in the XSD.

Compression, Encryption/Authentication, & Encoding

To learn about these operations, see Recommended Set Up Steps.

API General Information