Send SMS from Ruby On Rails application using web service, SOAP API

Bhushan G Ahire — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:09:19 +0000

SOAP4R is a Ruby library for accessing Web Services via SOAP. Recently I had a chance to explore SOAP4R. Here’s how to get started with it.

Installation

Although Ruby 1.8.x comes with SOAP4R in its standard library, it is an old, buggy version. I highly recommend using the latest gem (1.5.8 as of the this update). It has one dependency, httpclient.

gem install soap4r --include-dependencies

Service

There are many services available to send SMS but I prefer to use,

MailServe-SMS

MailServe-SMS, text messaging service, is everything you need for fast, no-frills, no-fuss text messaging. A quick and easy way to send SMS.

Let’s explore these further.

Method 1: Read the WSDL at run-time

require "soap/wsdlDriver"
wsdl = "http://sms.qlc.co.in/smsapi.wsdl"
driver = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(wsdl).create_rpc_drive

A single call to a driver factory reads the WSDL file, and creates a driver class for you to use, complete with the methods defined by the service. What if your service requires authentication? The driver inherits methods from httpclient, so you can specify its options as you would for httpclient:

Once driver is get initialised you need to call SMS sending API i.e. SendSMSRequest.

driver.SendSMSRequest("username", "password", "sender_no", "from_no", "message")

Once This will return you response 200 SMS sent successfully on success else if the information submitted was wrong then 500 Information submitted was incomplete.

Method 2: Generate classes from WSDL

SOAP4R installs a command-line utility called ‘wsdl2ruby’ which can generate a client or server.