If you are submitting messages using the API you may not be aware we offer the ability to submit multiple messages in one call, rather than making lots of single submissions from your side.
Submitting in batches has a number of advantages, including:
- A reduction in network calls you need to make,
- Faster acceptance of your messages,
- Optimised throughput to our gateway.
The batching options available to you differ based on which underlying API your code is using. Your code can either be consuming a SOAP Web Service, or making HTTP calls to an ASPX page.
SOAP Web Service
If you are making API calls to the SendService Web Service then you have full access to both batching methods that we expose. These methods allow you to:
- Send the same message text to multiple mobile numbers,
- Submit a collection of message objects that can contain different mobile numbers and message texts.
If you are submitting the same message text to multiple mobile numbers (for example, a marketing message going to a group of subscribers), then take advantage of the SendMessageMultipleRecipients and SendMessageMultipleRecipientsFull methods. These take a collection of mobile numbers instead of a single mobile number.
If you need to submit a number of messages at the same time, but the content of the messages differ (for example, sending personalised messages to your customers), then you can use the SendMessageBatch method. This method takes a collection of messagesubmission objects, and a messagesubmission object contains all of the message information for a single message.
HTTP Post
If you are using the HTTP post interface to send messages, then the only batching option available is sending the same message text to a collection of mobile numbers. To do this all you need to do is comma separate the mobile numbers as part of the Recipient parameter in a SendSMS.aspx HTTP call.
Handling the Response
Calling one of these methods will result in a number of message IDs being returned to you, rather than a single ID you get when submitting a single message. This collection of IDs is ordered in the same way as the messages you originally submitted.
Important Notes
- Our testing has shown that the optimum number of messages per batch should be no more than 50.
- Delivery receipts and any inbound responses to a batched message aren't handled any differently to normal single submissions
- In the case where an individual message in a batch is not accepted (and the rest of the batch is OK), the returned message ID for that message will be an empty Guid (00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000)