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Sending SOS requests with CURL

CURL is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols like HTTP or HTTPS. The command is designed to work without user interaction. CURL offers a busload of useful tricks like proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer resume and more. The number of features will make your head spin! For detailed information, please refer to the man pages or this wiki page.

Examples for the following content are provided in curl-test.sh.

JSON request

CURL supports sending HTTP POST requests with JSON content. We are going to use it, to send all kind of requests to a 52°North SOS instance. Let's start over with a basic example, the getCapabilities request. Below, the request is listed in JSON format.

{ 
  "request": "GetCapabilities", 
  "service": "SOS" 
}

To send it to a SOS server using CURL we need to set JSON as POST request content type, specifiy the getCapabilities JSON request as data element and provide the SOS service endpoint URL as argument. For testing it is recommended to use the -v switch of CURL to receive verbose log messages.

❗ Note:

For improved readability the following commands have been split into multiple lines using the shell \ command for continuing lines. Avoid of whitespaces after the \, as they break the command.

curl  -v \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -X POST \
      -d '{ "request": "GetCapabilities", "service": "SOS" }' \
    http://mysos.de:8080/52-sos-webapp/service

Specifiying the JSON data as string in the CURL call can be unpleasant and confusing. Hence, it is recommended to use a JSON files instead and include it with @{filename} in the request. If you have a getCapabilities request stored in a JSON file, your CURL call would look like this:

  • getCapabilities.json

    {
  "request": "GetCapabilities", 
  "service": "SOS" 
}

  • CURL request

    curl  -v \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -X POST \
      -d @"path/to my/getCapabilities.json" \
    http://mysos.de:8080/52-sos-webapp/service

Make sure to enclose file paths containing spaces in quotes.

SOAP request

Sending SOAP requests to your SOS server using CURL works alomst the same as for JSON requests. However, the content type needs to be changed to application/soap+xml. The CURL call for sending the InsertSensor request from the InsertSensor folder is listed below. The response of the request is written to response.xml in this example.

curl  -v \
      -H "Content-Type: application/soap+xml;charset=UTF-8" \
      -X POST \
      -d @"../InsertSensor/insertSensor-SOAP.xml" \
    http://mysos.de:8080/52n-sos-webapp/service > response.xml

SOS Transactional security

The 52°North SOS can be configured to restrict access to transactional operations like InsertSensor or InsertObservation. Besides host based authentification, a transactional authorization token can be used to identify users allowed for transactional operations.

If a transactional authorization token is set for the SOS server you are sending a request to, you need to specifiy a HTTP authorization header by adding following switch to your CURL call: -H "Authorization: {token}"

Below you can see an example including a transactional authorization token.

curl  -v \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -H "Authorization: IamTheSecretToken-c1db8eb9f3f7" \
      -X POST \
      -d @"path/to my/insertObservation.json" \
    http://mysos.de:8080/52-sos-webapp/service