Harvard Health Content External Web Service Documentation
Introduction
Intended Audience
The intended audience of this Web Services documentation includes software engineers, web designers and quality assurance engineers who develop, maintain and test software that will interface with the Harvard Health Content External Web Service.
Authentication/Authorization
To authenticate Web Service callers, in addition to including the SiteName, the IP address of the caller is compared with a list of registered IP addresses for that license. Therefore, a client must supply the list of IP addresses for their own servers which will be making Web Service calls. This list must include the IP addresses for any necessary development and testing servers. Remember to supply the IP addresses as seen by our servers. For instance, if traffic originating from your server is passed through a NAT device, we need the IP address of its external interface. To assist us in managing the licenses for Web Service clients, each IP address registered must have a short description attached such as "in-house development server", "developer workstation", etc.
General Usage
The Web Services are available at URLs under: http://www.content.health.harvard.edu/[SiteName]/ (where [SiteName] would be substituted with the appropriate value for the client license).
In extenuating circumstances, you could experience "500 Internal server error" responses, such as during server maintenance.
If the server cannot interpret the HTTP request, a "400 Bad Request" response is generated. This could happen if the service name or method name is incorrect, or the wrong number or names of parameters have been supplied.
The Web Services can be accessed using HTTP GET requests. All Web Service calls use the same URL structure:
- http://www.content.health.harvard.edu/[SiteName]/Content.svc/[MethodName]?ParameterName=Value&ParameterName2=Value
- [SiteName] as described above.
- [MethodName] will contain the name of the Web Service method being accessed.
- The parameters for each method are detailed in each method's page on this site.
- The response to all method calls will be an XML document.
- The response status code will always be 200 if the server actually received and processed the request. Errors encountered during the processing of the request can be detected by looking at the response XML. The root element will be "<Errors>".