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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through June 21, 2007 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| saimike New member Username: Saimike Post Number: 6 Registered: 02-2007 |
bryce, i'm trying to send a EMS with no formatting (bold etc) or picture. the recipient phones are getting no content, and on turning on debug on a recipient phone, we found that it is not receiving any content. are there any logs i can take to see what nowsms server is sending? appreciate your help in debugging this. fwiw, all phones are on the cingular/att network. | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 7148 Registered: 10-2002 |
Hi, If you are using the "Send EMS Text Message" form to send a message, and you don't include any EMS attributes in the message, then the message that NowSMS sends out is not in a valid format. NowSMS assumes that at least one EMS attribute is going to be specified. And it gets confused if there are no EMS attributes. Basically, there is no such thing as an EMS message without EMS attributes. An EMS message is a standard text message but with formatting attributes included in the UDH (user data header). If you don't include any EMS attributes, NowSMS still generates the UDH, but with a zero-length ... and technically, I'm not sure that a zero-length UDH is valid ... instead, no UDH should be present. For future reference, if you want to see the raw message that NowSMS is sending out, refer to the SMSOUT-yyyymmdd.LOG file. -bn | |||
| saimike New member Username: Saimike Post Number: 11 Registered: 02-2007 |
Thanks for the info Bryce! Is the behavior by NowSMS as designed? I'd imagine that anybody designing a protocol like EMS would have included requirements which say something to the effect that "if there are no special EMS formatting/graphics in the message, then it shall be sent as a normal SMS." It just seems strange that in the absence of EMS specific formatting, the message sent is in an invalid format. | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 7223 Registered: 10-2002 |
No, it is not by design. An EMS message is a standard SMS message with various attributes in the user data header of the message. (User data header is also used for concatenation of long messages and port addressing, so it is not EMS specific.) If an EMS message is received by a phone that doesn't support EMS, then that phone should simply ignore the user data header settings for EMS and display the text. So an EMS message is always a standard SMS message. When we designed the "Send EMS Message" web form in NowSMS, we just assumed that if someone was using that form it was because they wanted to send an SMS message that included EMS formatting attributes. If they didn't ... then instead of not generating any user data header in the resulting message, NowSMS would generate a user data header with a length of 0. Some phones appear to be ok with this, others see a blank or corrupt message. As I said, technically, I don't know if that is valid or not. The specifications don't seem to address this ... although I could be missing something. But bottom line ... regardless of whether or not it is technically valid ... it is strange, and it was not our intent. And it has been changed for the next release. -bn | |||
