Authentication Information in the request header

Hi Innovators,

We hope you have been viewing the quick start videos.Those videos are meant to give you a better understanding on how the Project Nimbus  data services can be of help for you.

Some of you have gotten your tokens and have been using the data services. We thank your enthusiasm.

This post is for those who may need a little more help with the authentication with the process.

In the below example, we are using the scenario when an innovator is make a data service call to https://api.projectnimbus.org/HGWoDataService.svc/RestaurantSet
The header information in the request will look something like below:

GET /hgwodataservice.svc/RestaurantSet HTTP/1.1

AccountKey: mAnf12J0x9V6vnql2kbePuoWUJs-
UniqueUserID: 00000000000000000000000000000001
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Accept-Language: en-SG
Accept-Encoding: GZIP
Host: api.projectnimbus.org
Connection: Keep-Alive

The 2 piece of necessary information required is the AccountKey & UniqueUserID. 

The AccountKey is  a pre-generated string of characters that we  issue to innovators who will like to access the Nimbus API. Just insert your accountkey properly in this part of the header.
The UniqueUserID is  a globally unique identifier or GUID (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Identifier for more information) it is a  string of 32 hexadecimal characters. The UniqueUserID  is a desgin decision as a required information  to facilitate future features of the data service. (We will write about this soon)
It is safe to say that you can use any system-generated GUID  for your request headers for now. (Please note that  a string of Zeros.”0″ will not do the trick )

Both Valid Account Key value and UniqueUserID value (GUID) are  required to successfully authenticate with data service. If not, a 403 error will occur with an error message stating ”Authentication Headers are not present”.

Hope this helps. Check out the following links to see related information.

Refer to http://projectnimbus.org/getting-started/ on how you can get your UserID and look within  the code samples on how  are the information added to the request headers.
The video on the post: http://projectnimbus.org/2010/02/23/what-is-returned-from-data-service/ covers in brief how the authentication works.