Acumen Development

The modern concept of ‘web services’ has always existed in one form or another. Originally the protocols were binary and incredibly complex to integrate, but times have changed a lot. However, there are still large swathes of service providers who provide web-based APIs, but only support primitive versions of these- relying on ‘file drops’ and simple callbacks. Worse still, these providers are particularly resistant to changing their ways. This can be a serious bar of entry for more modern development companies who are used to a SOAP/REST based system, stopping them climb the supplier chain.

This short example shows how you can use PHP to integrate with a supplier who insists on using a file drop mechanism – in this case, to get your date-stampped CSV files, prefixed “file-” wrapped up in ZIP file using the format user-DMY, on an FTP site of their choice!

$host='www.example.com';
$user='myuser';
$pass='mypass';
$date=date('dmy');

// where to store file
$store='/tmp/files.zip';

// get file
$ch = curl_init('ftp://{$user}:{$pass}@{$host}/{$user}-{$date}.zip');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$file=curl_exec($ch);
file_put_contents($store,$file);

// output ids of all entries
$entries = getEntriesFromCSV(getEntryFile($store) );
foreach($entries as $entry){
    print '{$entry['id']}\n';
}

/*
* @desc   Get CSV number file from local ZIP file
* @author Leo Brown
* @param  $file String Local file to open
*/
function getEntryFile($file)
{
    if ($file &
    &
    is_resource($zip = zip_open($file))) {
        while ($entry=zip_read($zip)) {
            if ('file' == substr(zip_entry_name($entry),0,4)) {
                return zip_entry_read($entry, zip_entry_filesize($entry
                )
                );
            }
        }
    }
}

/*
* @desc   Get provider entries from CSV formatted string
* @author Leo Brown
* @param  $file String Allocated entries as 'entry,t1,t2,t3\n'
*/
function getEntriesFromCSV($file)
{
    $lines=explode('\n',$file);
    $entries=array();
    foreach($lines as $line){
        $fields=explode(',',trim($line));
        if (is_numeric($fields[0])) {
            $entry=array('id'=>$fields[0],
            'data1'=>@$fields[1],
            'data2'=>@$fields[2],
            'data3'=>@$fields[3]
            );
            $entry[$fields[0]]=array_filter($entry);
        }
    }
    return $entries;
}
?>