As you can guess from recent topics, web services have been a hot issue around here. Whether it’s in the dialplan or the agent scripting, we find that call centers are increasingly looking for live data delivered in real time, and web services are a great way to do this.
Where things do sometimes falter is on initial setup and testing. Hours and hours get spent diagnosing whether an issue is on the remote side or in the way the receiver is interpreting the data. Tests get set up and run, the results are checked, then some incremental change is made and the test run again.
It really doesn’t have to be that complicated.
There are a couple of tools that we use to help cut down the testing and verification time:
1) Just create a file and have it downloaded.
If you’re sending a request and expecting an XML or JSON file with certain fields back, just create a simple valid case in the form of a file. Break out your favourite text editor and write it out. It could be something as simple as:
