User

Before making any requests for data a user needs to authenticate.  Authentication can either be direct or indirect.  For direct authentication a username and password must be supplied.  An indirect method of authentication is to provide a reactid token, which is a temporary session hash that is returned when direct authentication is used.  Indirect authentication is possible when using <SOAP/WSDL Interface> with SOAP headers.  The benefit of indirect authentication is that the need to send username and password for every method call is eliminated.  For information on authentication using a specific interface see the Interfaces submenu on the left.

It is also possible to further restrict access to users on the basis of IP or host masks, see Host Restrictions.

A session represents a valid authentication of a specific user.  Whenever a user logs in using his username and password, a reactid is returned.  This 32 character string is the identifier of a new valid session for that user.  This reactid can be used instead of the username and password as a valid means of authentication in further service requests.  A session is ended when the user logs out, in which case the reactid becomes invalid.

A user is a member of one or more user Groups.  These Groups determine what the user is allowed to do.  All users are members of the Group::Users group.  Other groups include Group::Account users and Group::Account admins.

Users can be created by the account admin using Webview Interface or using the Accounting::userCreateV2 method.  In both cases the user has to be activated by agreeing to the conditions listed in the activation email.