Using CMX Mobility Services, developer may leverage device location via Wi-Fi and device MAC address. Customer experiences may be improved by providing coupons, promotions, and other push notifications to devices. Additionally, various client location based service solutions may be developed providing many useful applications for use by the end device user as well as the venue operator.

This solution is an exciting suite of mobile software solutions that detect, connect, and engage with mobile devices operating in a Wi-Fi field. The individual mobile software offerings work together to create a total solution that you can configure to the benefit of your clients and their end users in a very wide variety of real world situations.

The CMX Mobility Services Restful API allows you to use them across languages, platforms, and frameworks. Using the APIs, you can develop application solutions that will use real-time intelligence gathered from your Wi-Fi network to enable people and their devices to interact more effectively through real-time contextual information such as location, temperature, availability of a user, or mobile device asset.

This guide provides information about the CMX Mobility Services Restful API. For more information about the Cisco CMX Mobility Application, see http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/mse/8-0/CMX-Connect-and-Engage-Mobile-SDK/guide/Cisco-CMX-ConnectEngage-Mobile-SDK-Config-Guide.html.

Note	To view information related to all CMX Mobility Services features and guides, visit the Cisco DevNet Site.

The Cisco Connect Mobile Experiences (Cisco CMX) provides simplified Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs for use in various ways. The advantages of RESTful APIs are:

• Based on the stateless REST architecture.

• The information is delivered over the well-understood HTTP/HTTPS protocol.

• Simplified design and easy to understand Resource URIs. These are usually self-explanatory.

• Standardized libraries allow content negotiation capabilities by automatically sending the response in the user requested format.

• Gives us a chance to simplify our data model, deprecate the older non scalable APIs, remove hierarchy dependency and do other enhancements.

The REST API uses the following HTTP methods:

• GET—The HTTP method that retrieves a representation of a resource.

• PUT—The HTTP method that stores an entity at a URI. This method helps to create a new entity or update existing entities.

• POST—The HTTP method that requests the resource at the URI to perform some action with the provided entity.

• DELETE—The HTTP method that requests to remove a resource.

The Cisco CMX provides updated documents specific to the REST API. The documentation provide the name, methods, and structure of the REST API query. For more information about REST API documentation, see http://mse-ip-address/apidocs/.

The REST API documentation is divided into five logical categories based on the specific functionality. The APIs are categorized as:

• Configuration API—APIs to configure the Cisco CMX programmatically.

• Location API—APIs to retrieve client location data programmatically from the Cisco CMX.

• Analytics API—APIs to retrieve Analytics data programmatically from the Cisco CMX.

• Connect API—APIs to find user session information.

• Presence API—APIs to find visitor presence data.

To send queries to the Cisco MSE, you require a username and password. These credentials are required to create a base64 encoded string. After successful authentication, request are sent using the HTTP method (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE).

The following is the workflow for REST API:

1. Authentication is sent from the client side, before initiating the request using the Authorization header.

2. Combine the username and password credentials to form a sting " username:password".

3. Use Base64 to encode the resulting string literal.

4. Add an authorization method, a space and the staring "Basic" before the encoded string.

For example, if the user agent uses 'MyUsername' as username and 'MyPassword as password then the header is formed as follows:

• Authorization: Basic QxhZGluOnNlc2FtIG9wZW4=

• Authentication is sent to the root URI to reach (For example: https://<mseip>/api/contextaware)

A Python 2.7.x sample to create Base64 encoded authentication string (see the below image):

import urllib2

|
mse_user = 'username'                ##MSE Username
mse_pass = ;password'                ##MSE Password

password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultrealm()
password_manager.add_password(
    None, 'https://ip-address-of-mse' , mse_user, mse_pass  ##IP Address or resolvable hostname
)
auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_handler)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

There are three ways to interact with the REST API:

• Try it method

• REST Client Plugin (Supported in browsers Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox)

• Using Programming Language