Overview

» StrikeIron offers hundreds of commercial data services ("Data as a Service") such as Online Sales Tax, Currency Rates, Stock Quotes, Geocodes, Global Address Verification, Yellow/White Pages, MapQuest Driving Directions, Dun & Bradstreet Business Credit Checks, and much, much more.

Each StrikeIron web service shares a standard SOAP (and REST) API, making it easy to integrate and manage multiple services. StrikeIron also manages customer billing for all services in a single account, making it perfect for solution providers. Get started with free web services at » http://www.strikeiron.com/sdp.

StrikeIron's services may be used through the » PHP 5 SOAP extension alone. However, using StrikeIron this way does not give an ideal PHP-like interface. The Zend_Service_StrikeIron component provides a lightweight layer on top of the SOAP extension for working with StrikeIron services in a more convenient, PHP-like manner.

Note: The PHP 5 SOAP extension must be installed and enabled to use Zend_Service_StrikeIron.

The Zend_Service_StrikeIron component provides:

A single point for configuring your StrikeIron authentication credentials that can be used across many StrikeIron services.
A standard way of retrieving your StrikeIron subscription information such as license status and the number of hits remaining to a service.
The ability to use any StrikeIron service from its WSDL without creating a PHP wrapper class, and the option of creating a wrapper for a more convenient interface.
Wrappers for three popular StrikeIron services.

Registering with StrikeIron

Before you can get started with Zend_Service_StrikeIron, you must first » register for a StrikeIron developer account.

After registering, you will receive a StrikeIron username and password. These will be used when connecting to StrikeIron using Zend_Service_StrikeIron.

You will also need to » sign up for StrikeIron's Super Data Pack Web Service.

Both registration steps are free and can be done relatively quickly through the StrikeIron website.

Getting Started

Once you have » registered for a StrikeIron account and signed up for the » Super Data Pack, you're ready to start using Zend_Service_StrikeIron.

StrikeIron consists of hundreds of different web services. Zend_Service_StrikeIron can be used with many of these services but provides supported wrappers for three of them:

The class Zend_Service_StrikeIron provides a simple way of specifying your StrikeIron account information and other options in its constructor. It also has a factory method that will return clients for StrikeIron services:

span style="color: #ff0000;">'username' => 'your-username',
                                                'password' => 'your-password''class' => 'SalesUseTaxBasic'));

The getService() method will return a client for any StrikeIron service by the name of its PHP wrapper class. In this case, the name 'SalesUseTaxBasic' refers to the wrapper class Zend_Service_StrikeIron_SalesUseTaxBasic. Wrappers are included for three services and described in Bundled Services.

The getService() method can also return a client for a StrikeIron service that does not yet have a PHP wrapper. This is explained in Using Services by WSDL.

Making Your First Query

Once you have used the getService() method to get a client for a particular StrikeIron service, you can utilize that client by calling methods on it just like any other PHP object.

span style="color: #ff0000;">'username' => 'your-username',
                                                'password' => 'your-password'));
 
// Get a client for the Sales & Use Tax Basic service
'class' => 'SalesUseTaxBasic'));
 
// Query tax rate for Ontario, Canada
'province' => 'ontario'

In the example above, the getService() method is used to return a client to the Sales & Use Tax Basic service. The client object is stored in $taxBasic.

The getTaxRateCanada() method is then called on the service. An associative array is used to supply keyword parameters to the method. This is the way that all StrikeIron methods are called.

The result from getTaxRateCanada() is stored in $rateInfo and has properties like province and GST.

Many of the StrikeIron services are as simple to use as the example above. See Bundled Services for detailed information on three StrikeIron services.

Examining Results

When learning or debugging the StrikeIron services, it's often useful to dump the result returned from a method call. The result will always be an object that is an instance of Zend_Service_StrikeIron_Decorator. This is a small » decorator object that wraps the results from the method call.

The simplest way to examine a result from the service is to use the built-in PHP functions like » print_r():

span style="color: #ff0000;">'username' => 'your-username',
                                                'password' => 'your-password''class' => 'SalesUseTaxBasic''province' => 'ontario'

In the output above, we see that the decorator ($rateInfo) wraps an object named GetTaxRateCanadaResult, the result of the call to getTaxRateCanada().

This means that $rateInfo has public properties like abbreviation, province, and GST. These are accessed like $rateInfo->province.

Tip

StrikeIron result properties sometimes start with an uppercase letter such as Foo or Bar where most PHP object properties normally start with a lowercase letter as in foo or bar. The decorator will automatically do this inflection so you may read a property Foo as foo.

If you ever need to get the original object or its name out of the decorator, use the respective methods getDecoratedObject() and getDecoratedObjectName().

Handling Errors

The previous examples are naive, i.e. no error handling was shown. It's possible that StrikeIron will return a fault during a method call. Events like bad account credentials or an expired subscription can cause StrikeIron to raise a fault.

An exception will be thrown when such a fault occurs. You should anticipate and catch these exceptions when making method calls to the service:

span style="color: #ff0000;">'username' => 'your-username',
                                                'password' => 'your-password''class' => 'SalesUseTaxBasic''province' => 'ontario'// error handling for events like connection
  // problems or subscription errors
 
}

The exceptions thrown will always be Zend_Service_StrikeIron_Exception.

It's important to understand the difference between exceptions and normal failed method calls. Exceptions occur for exceptional conditions, such as the network going down or your subscription expiring. Failed method calls that are a common occurrence, such as getTaxRateCanada() not finding the province you supplied, will not result an in exception.

Note: Every time you make a method call to a StrikeIron service, you should check the response object for validity and also be prepared to catch an exception.

Checking Your Subscription

StrikeIron provides many different services. Some of these are free, some are available on a trial basis, and some are pay subscription only. When using StrikeIron, it's important to be aware of your subscription status for the services you are using and check it regularly.

Each StrikeIron client returned by the getService() method has the ability to check the subscription status for that service using the getSubscriptionInfo() method of the client:

// Get a client for the Sales & Use Tax Basic service
'username' => 'your-username',
                                                'password' => 'your-password''class => ''));
 
// Check remaining hits for the Sales & Use Tax Basic service
$subscription = $taxBasic->getSubscriptionInfo();
echo $subscription->remainingHits;

The getSubscriptionInfo() method will return an object that typically has a remainingHits property. It's important to check the status on each service that you are using. If a method call is made to StrikeIron after the remaining hits have been used up, an exception will occur.

Checking your subscription to a service does not use any remaining hits to the service. Each time any method call to the service is made, the number of hits remaining will be cached and this cached value will be returned by getSubscriptionInfo() without connecting to the service again. To force getSubscriptionInfo() to override its cache and query the subscription information again, use getSubscriptionInfo(true).