Authentication

The JobWatch API uses Basic Authentication, which requires the user to send a verified username, password and key as headers, as part of the web service requests.

The key is a unique identifier and is unique for each customer. This is provided by BigChange upon consultation

The below URL base is to be used for all web-services calls: https://webservice.bigchange.com/v01/services.ashx?parameters

Query String Parameters:

Name	Type	Description	Note
Action	String	What do you want to do? e.g. ContactSave, JobSave etc.

Optional parameter:

Name	Type	Description	Note
Format	String	Format of the data returned. Available: JSON / XML / CSV	The default is JSON.

info

CSV format will return a csv formatted file instead of the standard service response

Building the Request in Postman

1. Open Postman and create a new request.
2. Set the request type to GET.
3. Enter the URL: https://webservice.bigchange.com/v01/services.ashx?action=ping.
4. Click on the Authorization tab.
5. Select Basic Auth from the dropdown and enter your username and password.
6. Click on the Headers tab.
7. Add a new header with the key key and the value provided by BigChange.
8. Click on the Send button to make the request.
9. The response will be displayed in the Response section.

Alternatively, to create the Authorization header manually, you need to encode the username and password in base64 format, and then add it to the header with the key Authorization.

Example: username: test@test.com, password: password123, formatted as: test@test.com:password123 will be encoded to: dGVzdEB0ZXN0LmNvbTpwYXNzd29yZDEyMw==.

Example

C#

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
                    
public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        string _bigchangeUrl = "https://webservice.bigchange.com/v01/services.ashx";
        string username = "Username";
        string password = "Password";
        string key = "CustomerKey";

        string credentials = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(username + ":" + password));
        string url = $"{_bigchangeUrl}?action=ping";

        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
        request.Headers["Authorization"] = "Basic " + credentials;
        request.Headers["key"] = key;
        request.Method = "GET";

        HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
        Stream resStream = response.GetResponseStream();
        StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(resStream);
        string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();

        Console.WriteLine(responseFromServer);
    }
}

Python

import requests
import base64

_bigchangeUrl = "https://webservice.bigchange.com/v01/services.ashx"

username = "Username"
password = "Password"
key = "CustomerKey"

jwheaders = {
        "Authorization": f"Basic {base64.b64encode((username + ':' + password).encode()).decode()}",
        "key": f"{key}",
    }

url = f'{_bigchangeUrl}?action=ping'
response = requests.get(url, headers=jwheaders).json()
print(response)