Contact your Account Manager for a username and password.

This is customer, deployment, and version dependent. Please contact your Account Manager for this information.

No. We believe our Web Services API provides a comprehensive set of operations.

The "Update" methods are also "Insert" methods. Depending upon the "Id" property of the entity you submit, an insert or update will be performed. For inserts, the "Id" property should be set to "-1". We do not offer "Deletes" through the Web Services API for security reasons.

The most probable cause is that you provided an "Id" for an entity that does not exist. Ids must be "-1" for new entities or a valid Id. Some programming languages will turn an empty/null int property into "0" while others will try and leave it blank. You should make certain you initialize your entities to "-1" if you wish to insert a new entity.

When translating the entity into XML, some programming languages will turn an empty/null datetime or boolean property into an empty node (e.g. or ) which will cause an XML parse error since the empty string cannot be parsed into a boolean or datetime. It is important you either provide values for these types or set (if available) it so the node is not created at all.

The answer varies depending upon the language you are using. A couple of examples below should get you started.

In Java, assuming you want to set the proxy for the entire VM:

						  
Properties props = new Properties(System.getProperties());
props.put("http.proxySet", "true");
props.put("http.proxyHost", "proxy.ssl.myhosting.company.com");
props.put("http.proxyPort", "8080");
Properties newprops = new Properties(props);
System.setProperties(newprops);

In PHP5: You need to set the 'proxy_host' and 'proxy_port' attributes when setting up your SoapClient:

						  
$client = new SoapClient("https://--YOUR--DEPLOYMENT--?WSDL",
	array("login" => "--YOUR WEBSERVICE USERNAME--",
		"password" => "--YOUR WEBSERVICE PASSWORD--",
		"proxy_host" => "proxy.ssl.myhosting.company.com",
		"proxy_port" => "8080",
		"classmap" => $classmap,
		"trace" => 0));

Some programming languages (ActionScript to name one) do not allow you to set the 'Authorization' HTTP header, which is required to provide your username and password. To handle this, you may use the custom 'BB-Authorization' HTTP header instead. If your programming languages does not allow custom headers, then you cannot use the BrightBase API with that language.

For convenience we offer a single endpoint to all Web Service users, but you may access only those methods which you have been granted access to. In some cases you may have access to a particular Web Method if you are dealing with a particular entity type, but may have restricted access with dealing with another entity type.

Certain objects are exposed to you can read data from them. However, we do not allow the updating of data either for security reasons or because the object is a lookup object.

Because sensitive information, including authentication handshakes, take place we require that all Web Service calls be transported over the https protocol. We use the standard https port of 443, so most firewalls already have this port open.

We try our best to provide as much exposure to your data via our published Web Services API. If there is something our standard implementation does not handle, please contact your Account Manager. They will ensure the requests gets routed to the internal product manager for consideration in a future release.

Currently there is not. All calls made into your database using the BrightBase Web Services API will be reflected in your live system(s). So be very careful. As a best practice, we recommend developing your applications prior to your launch. Your Account Manager can advise you on this and other things related to third-party integration processes.

"To" stands for "Transfer Object". We follow the "Transfer Object" OO Design Pattern (also known as the Value Object Design Pattern) which allows us to expose our entities to you in a cross-platform manner. The transfer object versions you use with the API are translated into objects that the BrightBase repository uses. For several reasons, including security, some of the Transfer Objects cannot be used to update data, only query it.

The various "Find*" methods grant access to almost any piece of data in the BrightBase repository and the "Update*" methods allow inserting or updating most data as well. However, for easy (e.g. 'simple') access which requires less knowledge of the data repository the API provides helper methods and objects. These 'simple' objects flatten some of the more complex objects for easier usage.