Sending AXL requests to Cisco CUCM with Postman is part 2 of 3 in our series taking you through the steps to get the most from your Cisco CUCM using the AXL API. This article assumes your CUCM has the AXL Service Enabled and that you have credentials for an Application User account with Standard AXL Access. Please read our part 1 post on integrating any 3rd party provisioning applications with your CUCM using Cisco AXL, if you require instructions on how to set that up before proceeding with part 2.

The Administrative XML Web Service (AXL) is an XML/SOAP based API that enables remote provisioning of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) using any modern (and even not so modern!) programming language. We will be looking at how to quickly test your AXL API calls using Postman. This Google Chrome App is a great tool for developers or anyone who wants an easy way for testing any web APIs (including Cisco’s AXL API). Now let’s review the steps required to set up and install Postman then to send an AXL request to Cisco CUCM with Postman.

Set up and install Postman

Step 1: Install & open Postman (Available at https://www.getpostman.com/)

Step 2: Provide the URL to your CUCM (typically your Publisher) in the address bar:

https:

Step 3: Go to the Authorization tab and select Basic Auth .

Step 4: Provide the credentials for the Application User with Standard AXL Access and click Update request .

Step 5. Clicking Send should now return an HTML response with the text:

"The AXL Web Service is working and accepting requests."

If your smoke test failed, validate the following things: Is the URL correct? Hostname Port Starts with https:// Ends with /axl/

Is the Cisco AXL Service enabled on on CUCM

Sending an AXL request to CUCM

Now that Postman has been setup and smoke tested against the Cisco AXL Service let’s send a real request. The below steps demonstrate how to send a getPhone AXL API request. This request will require the device’s name as part the request, and the CUCM will in turn respond with all the details of the phone.

For further details on API and the list of all possible transactions, please see the Cisco AXL Documentation.

Step 1: Set the request type to POST .





Step 2: Go to the Headers tab and add an entry SOAPAction with the value CUCM:DB ver=10.5 getPhone

Note: If you are on an older version of CUCM (ex. 8.5 or 9.1), swap out 10.5 for the version of your CUCM.





Step 3: In the Body tab, provide the getPhone request with the name of the phone to lookup (ex. SEPDD2338878585 )

Note: Notice once again the version number in the XML body. Swap out 10.5 for the version of your CUCM if necessary.

Step 4: Press Send and notice the XML response containing the details of the phone.

Congratulations! You have successfully sent an AXL API request to your CUCM using Postman. If you are interested in building solutions to help you with your UC environment using AXL, feel free to reach out to our Software Solutions Team. Our team of AXL gurus here use AXL extensively for a variety of software products, including SMACS.

For a more in-depth look at how you can query CUCM’s Informix database through AXL, check out part 3 of this series of how-to articles on Executing SQL queries against CUCM through AXL (#3).