As there are many options to interact with eC-Messenger, here are some Guidelines that you can use to decide on an optimal solution.

Plan your Interface#

Your decision to use one or more specific API's may depend on different details of your integration project. Here some thoughts:

• Is massive Data exchange required? This is generally expensive (time consuming, requires data space) and should be avoided. If it can not be avoided, investigate the options given with the scheduled Data Im/Exports.
• Are the use cases you plan require bidirectional operations (e.g. responding on error conditions)? Only few (but often-used) End-User driven integrations can be done in a "shoot-and-forget" manner; other integrations require some more bidirectional interaction. If response times do matter, consider the asynchronous API and plan your use case in a way, that immediate response is not required.
• Do you have professional programming power in-house? If yes, the (synchronous) SOAP based approaches can be considered as a most convinient alternative.
• If more complex Jobs can be defined (create group-add messages-send-track-delete group), the Asynchronous API should be considered.
• Data formats: XML has the benefit of beeing unamigious - if used right. There is no discussion about character encoding or quoting. The disadvantage is, that the total data size inceases (but it can be well compressed) and you may need programming power to write or read XML.
• Transfer Options: Note that FTP is usually more complex to secure than HTTP requests (including SOAP via HTTP). Still FTP is traditionally better for massive data. SCP ("Secure Copy") is a welcome alternative to FTP.
• If you have a well secured database, a direct JDBC access from our side may be easy to implement.

Comparison #

	To eC-M	From eC-M	Bidirectional
Short Requests Realtime	SOAP (synchronous) REST	automatic Notifications Event-Rules, SingleMessages, Reports	SOAP (synchronous) REST + custom HTTP Response
Massive Data periodic not Realtime	scheduled Imports JDBC-Imports SOAP (async)	scheduled export JDBC export scheduled Reports	chained Im/Exports JDBC im/export

Informations on things that are not explained in this web site (Items that do not have a link in the chart above) are explained in one of the eC-Messenger handbooks.