We have discussed the topic of two factor authentication previously several times, here regarding voice call ( https://datatechlabs.com/posts/56/two-factor-authentication-api-with-phone-call ), here in general ( https://datatechlabs.com/posts/48/two-factor-authentication-with-sms-and-voice-calling ) and here regarding one time passwords: https://datatechlabs.com/posts/32/usecase-one-time-password-generator-for-application-security
Now let's see how to do with SMS, simply by using our API. In general, sending SMS is as simple as constructing this simple request:
In this simple example above, the API will just send a hello, world! message to recipient. There are, however, ways to have more control about the sending process, like, for example: getting to know if the message was delivered or not, or sending non-latin encoded texts:
This request will ask for a delivery receipt (DLR) after the message was delivered:
Now, upon successful delivery, the API will do a HTTP POST to the address of the server specified in dlr-url and report on the on the success of delivery. The values of dlr-level attribute are integers, where 1 - means SMS-C delivery report, 2 - means endusers terminal delivery report and 3 means both of them.
In the case we need to send non-Latin characters, we can set desired character set with coding attribute:
Note, however, that most SMS carriers actually charge per bits of message sent (see https://datatechlabs.com/posts/13/anatomy-of-a-short-message ), i.e. only the messages with are 7-bit encoded (ASCII) are allowed to be 160 characters long before they are split into multiple segments.
