Finland Elisa MSISDN Forwarding

MSISDN Forwarding Finland Elisa

MSISDN Forwarding is a process that enables you to capture a phone number (the MSISDN) for billing the end user via an approved flow between the mobile networks (the MNOs), MessageCloud’s platform, and your server.

Now available in Finland for the first time, MSISDN Forwarding enables simpler premium rate services via MessageCloud's APIs, targeting 4.8 million mobile subscribers.

Please note that each of the MNOs in Finland implement MSISDN Forwarding in quite different ways, so you will need to ensure you take into account the differences. Our APIs will help you to integrate both kinds of implementation.

Together, Elisa and Saunalahati control 37% of the Finnish mobile market. Elisa acquired Saunalahati in 2005. Saunalahati is an MVNO, or virtual operator, which has its own branding but is powered by the Elisa mobile network, which means the approach to these MNOs is the same.

To use Elisa/Saunalahati MSISDN Forwarding, you will need to call our Retrieval API to request the MSISDN. Unlike Sonera, you cannot receive the MSISDN directly via Elisa/Saunalahati header enrichment.

Once you have the MSISDN, either through an API call or header enrichment, you can use it to complete the charge against the end user’s phone bill.

Elisa and Saunalahti

Elisa and Saunalahti use a transaction ID to enable direct operator billing instead of MSISDN forwarding. This means that the MSISDN is only available to you once a successful charge is made to the end user. In order to get a valid transaction ID there are three main actions: creating a session, redirecting the end user and retrieving the transaction ID.

For more details on how to charge an end user on this network, see our  Elisa Direct Operator Billing API

Transaction flow

Creating a session

To create a session you should perform an HTTP GET request to:

http://client.txtnation.com/finland/elisa_session.php

The API expects the following parameters to be sent:

A successful call to this API will return JSON in the format:

{ 
        "status": "ok",
        "ref_id": "55cdbc9279828",
        "redirect_url": "http://example.com"
}

The  ref_id returned from this request is your session ID. We use this to ensure that the result of the transaction ID generation is available to you at the end of the process. If the request is unsuccessful you will receive status: "error" in the response. An example of this is shown below:

{
        "status": "error",
        "error_code": 1,
        "error_message": "Missing parameter: cc"
}

Including the HTTP response headers, the full response may look like this:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request 
X-Served-By: Eos.txtnation.UK 
Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8 
Transfer-Encoding: chunked 
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2015 14:43:49 GMT 
Server: txtNation HTTP Server  

{"status":"error","error_code":1,"error_message":"Missing parameter: cc"}

A full list of error codes are displayed below for your reference:

Redirecting the end user

Now that we have a  ref_id for our session you can use this to redirect the end user to Elisa/Saunalahti so that they can generate a transaction ID. This is achieved by issuing an HTTP 302 redirect to:

http://client.txtnation.com/finland/elisa_redirect.php?ref_id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Please note that you must pass your  ref_id otherwise we will be unable to return the transaction ID of the end user at the end of the process.

Once the transaction ID has been generated, the end user will be redirected back to the  return_url you provided during the initial call to elisa_session.

Retrieving the transaction ID

Once the user has returned to your  return_url, you can call the retrieval API to obtain the transaction ID. The API is hosted at:

http://client.txtnation.com/finland/elisa_get_transaction_id.php

The API expects the following parameters to be sent:

A successful call to this API will return JSON in the format:

{
        "status": "ok",
        "ref_id": "55cdbc9279828",
        "transaction_id": "154289130250073169514852",
        "ip": "86.214.255.123"
}

If the request is unsuccessful you will receive status: "error" in the response. An example of this is shown below:

{
        "status": "error",
        "error_code": 1,
        "error_message": "Missing parameter: cc"
}

Including the HTTP response headers, the full response may look like this:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
X-Served-By: Eos.txtnation.UK 
Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8 
Transfer-Encoding: chunked 
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2015 14:48:34 GMT 
Server: txtNation HTTP Server  

{"status":"error","error_code":1,"error_message":"Missing parameter: cc"}

A full list of error codes are displayed below for your reference: