Question

I am trying to create a form where a user can check their Gift Card Balance. The company we use has an API available. I wanted to be able to create a form where a user puts in their Name and Gift Card Number, hit submit, and return their card balance.

I created the form but am not to famililar with passing the variable to the api and parsing the xml results to a web page.

API url: http://apps.card9.com/api/?cmd=balance&card=card Number&key=my api key

I created a basic form:

<form action="balance.php" method="post">
    Name: <input type="text" name="fname" />
    Card #: <input type="text" name="cardId" />
    <input type="submit" value="submit" name="submit">
</form>

Php Script I tried using that I ran across:

if(isset($_POST['cardId'])){
    $userId = $_POST['cardId'];
    $obj = simplexml_load_file('http://apps.card9.com/api/?cmd=balance&card=' . $cardId . '&key=**my api Key**');
}else{
    // failed to load the xml
}

If anyone can help or point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Using the simplexml_load_file() you should first see what the $obj is returning

print_r($obj);

Then you can determine what nodes you need to pull out:

$node = $obj->node;

or if there are hyphens in the node name

$node = $obj->{'node-name'};