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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ MMS & SMS Technical Discussions (unsupported) ⬆ Archive through October 29, 2003 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| adde |
Hello! Im very new to all this. My question might be to big, but Ill try. I would like to develop an application wich can recieves an mms from a users mobile phone. The image should be stored on a webserver, and a database should registrate the user. In return a sms is sent to the user from the webserver. Ok i know its a bit big question. But is there any posibillity to do this through Now SMS? Regards /Adde | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support |
Adde, That's a good type of application for NowSMS to help support. You'll find Lars in the "Now SMS/MMS Gateway Support" area working on a similar type of application (although not quite the same). The challenge right now is that whether or not you can make it work with the current version of the Now SMS/MMS Gateway depends on how the MMS system is configured at your mobile operator (or if you have a closed user group you can bypass the mobile operator MMS setup using Now SMS/MMS, but that's another story). Anyway, I'll explain the message flow in this type of application ... and explain where you can run into an operator setup issue. When a device receives an MMS message, what it actually receives first is an MMS notification message over SMS. This is a binary SMS message that contains header information about the MMS message, along with a URL pointer for retrieving the content of the MMS message. In order to receive the MMS notification message over SMS with NowSMS, you essentially have to be using a dedicated GSM modem device instead of a GSM phone acting as a modem. The reason for this is because a phone that supports MMS or even just WAP push, will intercept the MMS notification when it comes in via SMS, and the phone will never forward the message to the modem interface. A GSM modem doesn't have this problem. When the Now SMS/MMS Gateway receives one of these notification messages, it fetches the MMS message content URL and decompiles the message into separate content pieces ... storing the results in the MMS-IN directory for an application to process. From there, you could do what you want with the received MMS message content. If you want to reply back with an SMS message, you can issue an HTTP request to NowSMS to do this. That all is pretty straight-forward, although it is a little awkward as you have to have a program scanning the MMS-IN subdiectory on the NowSMS server. (By contrast, when NowSMS receives inbound SMS, there are other options for calling an application directly. But with MMS there is more information to convey so we use this file/directory-based approach.) Anyway ... where things get operator specific, is that with many operators, the MMS notification URL points to a URL that is on a private IP address inside the operator network or that is behind a firewall. So NowSMS tries to fetch the MMS message content, and it fails. See http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/372.html for a discussion of this type of scenario. The next release of Now SMS/MMS, v5.0, is going to have some additional features for handling these types of operator setups. The gateway will have the ability to initiate a GPRS connection over the modem, and fetch the MMS message content through an operator WAP gateway, so that the gateway looks just like the MMS client software on a mobile phone retrieving the MMS message. We'll also have some options in the next release for relaying received MMS messages over SMTP or an HTTP POST (XML-based MM7 format) to an application instead of just the file based interface. It'll be cool ... I'm especially excited about our having an opportunity to fetch the MMS content over GPRS and WAP so we can get around these screwy operator setups that are so unfriendly to third-party apps. If you have a GSM modem, you could run some tests now to see if there is an issue with your operator on being able to retrieve MMS message content as the current version of NowSMS does. If your operator does have this type of closed off MMSC setup, and your user group is a closed user group, you could get around this by configuring the mobile phones that will be submitting messages to your application so that they use Now SMS/MMS as their MMSC. Then the MMS messages never pass through the operator MMSC. When we have a beta release of Now SMS/MMS v5.0, we're going to post it here for testing prior to formal release. -bn | |||
