21 Aug 10 Managing Managed DNS, Web Hosting, Email Hosting, Live Chat, Website Builder Orders through your API integration

The Managed DNS, Web Hosting, Email Hosting, Live Chat and Website Builder Orders reside on separate servers from the ones you connect to, via the API Kits. Due to this, your Customers need to login into their (individual) Control Panels, for managing such Orders.

Gossimer now provides you with another method of directly allowing access to your Customer, to manage their Managed DNS, Web Hosting, Email Hosting, Live Chat and Website Builder Orders from your interfaces itself.

To accomplish this, you need to use either of these 2 methods and pass the following parameters to the mentioned URL, via an HTTP POST method:
 

Method 1 (recommended)

URL – http://<Your_Control Panel_Branded_URL>/servlet/ManageServiceServletForAPI

1. orderid – the Managed DNS/Web Hosting/Email Hosting/Live Chat/Website Builder Service Order Id that your Customer wants to manage
    
2. loginid – you need to generate a Login ID, that you need to pass as the value of this parameter for allowing the Customer to manage his Order. This can be accomplished by calling the API method generateLoginID in the Customer class. In order to call generateLoginID, you will have to pass ipAddress as a parameter. This Login ID generated will be valid for a very short period of time and you should use it immediately upon generating it.
    
3. viewdns – the value of this parameter can be either true or false. If you do not pass any value for this parameter, then it is interpreted as false.Pass true – if the Order is Web Hosting or Mail Hosting and you want to allow your Customer to manage the DNS Records of that particular Order.

   Pass false – if the Order is Web Hosting or Mail Hosting and you want your Customer to manage only the Web or Mail Hosting Order.

This method is the most secure method of allowing your Customers to manage their Managed DNS, Web Hosting, Email Hosting, Live Chat and Website Builder Orders, since it does not expose the Customer’s Username and Password in your interface.

If you choose to use this method, then you would need to create an intermediate interface to which you can provide the required parameters, and which in-turn generates a valid URL and redirects your Customer.

You need to provide orderid and any authentication details (optional) to this interface. This interface would then call the API method generateLoginID of the Customer class and build a URL with loginid, viewdns and orderid as parameters, and then redirect the Customer to this URL.

Example

Let us call this interface a servlet named ManageOrderBoxControlPanel (assuming that you are using our JAVA API Kit).

1. This interface would accept Managed DNS/Web Hosting/Email Hosting/Live Chat/Website Builder Service Order Id as a parameter. So, in order to manage a Service, you will call this interface with http://<Your-Server-URL>/ManageOrderBoxControlPanel?orderid=<orderid>.
    
2. Now this servlet would need to call the API method generateLoginID of the Customer class like -String loginid = API call to “generateLoginID(username,password,resellerid,langpref,role,ipAddress) ;

   where,
   

   • username – the Username of the Customer, to whom the Order belongs
   • password – the Password of the Customer, to whom the Order belongs
   • resellerid – the Reseller Id associated with your Reseller account. This is obtainable from Settings -> Personal Information -> Primary Profile in your Reseller Control Panel.
   • role – customer

    

3. The final URL to which you would then redirect your Customer to, would look like - http://<Your_Branded_URL>/servlet/ManageServiceServletForAPI?loginid=<loginid>&orderid=<orderid>&viewdns=<true/false>
    

The pseudo code for accomplishing the above is as follows:
 

Method 2

URL – http://<Your_Control Panel_Branded_URL>/servlet/ManageServiceServletForAPI

1. orderid – the Managed DNS/Web Hosting/Email Hosting/Live Chat/Website Builder Service Order Id that your Customer wants to manage
    
2. username – the Username of the Customer, to whom the Order belongs
    
3. password – the Password of the Customer, to whom the Order belongs
    
4. resellerid – the Reseller Id associated with your Reseller account. This is obtainable from Settings -> Personal Information -> Primary Profile in your Reseller Control Panel.
    
5. viewdns – the value of this parameter can be either true or false. If you do not pass any value for this parameter, then it is interpreted as false.Pass true – if the Order is Web Hosting or Mail Hosting and you want to allow your Customer to manage the DNS Records of that particular Order.

   Pass false – if the Order is Web Hosting or Mail Hosting and you want your Customer to manage only the Web or Mail Hosting Order.

The disadvantage of using this method is that it is a bit less secure as the Customer Username and Password along with your Reseller Id can be viewed in the source of the page, from where you post to the ManageServiceServletForAPI servlet.
 

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