GovDelivery’s Web Services provides two messages to initiate action on the GovDelivery system; SendBulletin and SynchronizeSubscriptionTree.
Previously, we saw an example of the usage of a SynchronizeSubscriptionTree. This post will describe how the SendBulletin message can be used.
An easy way to think about the SendBulletin web services message, is just as another way to use the “Send Item Bulletin” functionality that already exists in our system. Sending a bulletin through the SendBulletin web service is as easy to understand as constructing an email. You define who the message will be sent to, what the content is, and what address is used to send from, GovDelivery takes care of the rest.
When you use the SendBulletin message, you have the ability to specify these elements:
- Subject
- Header
- Body
- Footer
- From address
- From display name
- Subscription item(s) to send to
- Short message
- Short from address
- Short display name
- File attachment(s)
By using web services, you are able to specify any HTML to be included in the message, with your own formatting. Also, the short message is independent of the main body of the message, and is text only, allowing you to specify within the same SendBulletin envelope both long and short message bodies.
Using the document management example from before, let’s say that you would like to notify some of your subscribers that an entire area of your website haas changed. This affects a large number of your assets (how about 500), and you would like to send one email about this change making sure that your subscribers only get one email.
By constructing one SendBulletin request, and specifying all 500 of your changed assets in the request, GovDelivery will de-duplicate across all of those items to only send one message to each subscriber, regardless of how many of the 500 items they are subscribed to. Also, you can create your own content to describe the change set, rather than having one message per changed asset.
Technical notes: GovDelivery uses a SOAP API and publishes our WSDL to current clients. We have seen integrations using VB2005, Java 1.5, and VB2008. Please contact your account manager for details on web service integrations.
