Problem with sending MMS using HTTP GET

Problem with sending MMS using HTTP GET SearchSearch
Author Message
Marios Tziakouris
New member
Username: Mariost

Post Number: 1
Registered: 04-2004
Posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 12:01 am:   

Bruce,
I would like to congratulate you for the excellent support you are providing to this forum. Your input is extremely useful.

We are developing an application for a Stock Exchange that will send chart images and long company announcements to users on demamd i.e. initiate via SMS and reply via MMS.

Since our operator does not yet support MM7 we are going with a bank of GSM/GPRS modems (MC35i).

We have sucessfully installed NowSMS and we are able to send/receive/process SMS and send MMS from web interface.

The problem is when we are sending MMS via URL, an SMS notification is send instead of MMS to the MMSC. I follow your guidelines from other threads and 1) MMSC is running on a different port (82) than my IIS (80) and 2) we set an asterisk (*) to the MMSC routing tab (and of course change the default route to our MMSC connection via MM1).

The thing is that if we use this type of URL
http://127.0.0.1:8800/?PhoneNumber=xxxxxx&MMSFrom=sender@domain&
MMSSubject=Message+Subject&MMSText=An+optional+text+part+of+the+message&
MMSFile=http://www.nowsms.com/media/logo.gif

then everything is OK. If we use this type of URL
http://127.0.0.1:8800/?PhoneNumber=xxxxxxxx&MMSURL=name.domain/path/filename.mms

which contains an MMS file compiled with MMSCOMP as described in the documentation we have the issue with the SMS notification. I trust this is a routing problem of the gateway but I am not sure how to fix it.

Your quick input will be very much appreciated since we are on hurry to present our pilot project to the Board of Directors for approval.

MT
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 2368
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 07:03 pm:   

Hi MT,

I cannot think of any reason why that would not work.

Perhaps an error is being returned and you are not aware of it?

What happens if you go the NowSMS web interface, and send an MMS notification, referencing that URL via the menu.

Does NowSMS report any error?

NowSMS will try to fetch the URL and validate that the MIME type is configured correctly on the web server that is hosting the compiled MMS file. The usual problem would be if this attempt returned an error message "Invalid content type for MMS Message". That would mean that the web server that is hosting the content does not have the ".mms" file extension associated with the MIME content type "application/vnd.wap.mms-message".

If NowSMS does not complain about the URL ... then validate that the URL that you are providing is accessible from the external interent.

When you use NowSMS to send an MMS notification, NowSMS includes the exact URL that you specify in the notification, and the receiving phone will try to fetch that URL for the MMS message content.

Ah ... now that I re-read your message, I understand the problem. You are attempting to submit the message to an operator MMSC.

The "MMS Notification" function in NowSMS is designed to send an MMS notification for the URL that you specify. It will always do this via SMS, as that is how it is designed.

You want to route it through the operator MMSC, in which case you must submit the message as an MMSFILE parameter.

You can still use a pre-compiled MMS if you want:

http://127.0.0.1:8800/?PhoneNumber=xxxxxx&MMSFrom=sender@domain&
MMSSubject=Message+Subject&
MMSFile=http://name.domain/path/filename.mms

You can leave the "MMSFrom" and "MMSSubject" parameters out ... in fact, I believe we ignore them in this scenario.

Or, instead of specifying a pre-compiled MMS, specify multiple MMSFILE parameters pointing to the different pieces of content for the MMS message (including the SMIL file, if there is one).

-bn