Yardi Store Developer eXchange

Overview
SWS2 was written to eventually replace the current Yardi Centershift SWS API. Several improvements have been made to security, performance and use. There are three primary changes.
The first is the use of tokenization. Instead of the LookupUser_Request object used in most methods of the old API the new version is tokenized. The user name and password are passed in through the Credentials and a token is created. This token’s lifecycle allows for access with an approved token independent of connection timeouts. This means much less overhead when initiating a connection after a brief lapse since the last connection. Since it is the token that is verified with each call instead of the user name and password, several seconds are shaved off each call after the token is obtained. The configuration and binding do require a bit more effort as the addition of the service reference does not complete the configuration process, however details are documented in the Configuration section of this paper.
The second improvement is the use of the new WCF service. The older Soap versions were slower and less efficient with data compression. The newer WCF service uses more efficient compression and processing requests more quickly. It can also be used with Java and with PHP although Yardi, as a Microsoft shop does not provide documentation on using those platforms.
The last improvement is removing Store defined objects from the request and the response objects. There will still be some collections but the WSDL size should be greatly reduced as the Store.exe is no longer referenced. Again this should significantly improve performance particularly with the initial handshake.

Configuration
If you are using Visual Studio .Net the following is an example of a correct application configuration file for the Sandbox environment. Production environments will vary slightly in names and tokens. There are several elements that must be added manually as adding the reference does not automatically create these elements.

Supplying Credentials and Calling a Method
This is sample code for Microsoft .Net Framework. You will need to reference the System.IdentityModel available in the .Net Framework assemblies. Once you have done that you will want to add the following to the initial call to the API.

Those using PHP

We are a Microsoft shop and do not have any users who can assist with setting up SWS2 for the API. However, in the past we have had third parties create a .NET passthrough app and use PHP to access it. This would be your only option at this time to use PHP with SWS2.