I'm not sure how phpMyAdmin even figures into this....where did "layout changes" come from? (never mind, I see where it comes from and at the moment it's irrelevant) Are you trying to admin your database? or access it from code to get data from it?

WinHTTPRequest should be fine...

What prompted do you get if you were to go to http://www.mydomain.com/services/api/customer.php? without passing the ID and authToken in the string?
I'd expect to see an authorization error message. If the AuthToken isn't valid (the user isn't logged in, or the token has expired), then it should throw back an error message of somekind.

We maybe talking cross purpose here... it might be that I'm not 100% clear on the goal here...

What I assume:
you have a VB6 app that's on a desktop somewhere.
You have a database hosted by 1&1 out on the interwebtubesnet
You don't have direct access to the db because it is behind a firewall (as it should be)
So how do you get the data from the db into VB6?

What I'd do:
set up a set of pages that accepts arguments via POST or GET to perform the operations for you...
At the top of each one, it checks for the AuthToken - if it is invalid or wasn't passed in, the page generates an exception and sends it back.
From the VB6 code, I check the return value, was it the data I expected, or was it an error? If it's an error message, depending on what it is, I notify the user or do what's needed to fix it.
So if it gets back an authentication method, I know my token wasn' acctepted and I either need to prompt the user to login (not from a page though, but in your app) and resend it to get a new token by invoking the login web api... which takes the user id & pwd and sees if it is valid. The user never actually sees any pages or anything... their interaction is with the app.

there is no session, nothing in the browser. it's all communication between the app and the server. You send it data via GET/POST and it replies back with some thing - could be XML or JSON - or some other data structure - it's all up to you since you're the one building it.... I gravitate to XML because it's what I'm used to, but JSON is just as good.


Here's a real example ... I used similar setup to control a streaming radio station... so if I wanted info about an album, the call looked like this:
\radiostation\album?id=123445
and it would return this:
Code:
<album id=123445>
  <track id=453545 number=1>Track 1 Title</track>
  <track id=453546 number=2>Track 2 Title</track>
  <track id=453547 number=3>Track 3 Title</track>
  <track id=453548 number=4>Track 4 Title</track>
  <track id=453549 number=5>Track 5 Title</track>
</album>
And so I would then parse that XML into what I needed and display it. if you were to plug it into the url bar of a browser, that's exactly what you would get back - the raw XML rendered.... not html or anything else.

But that's just me...


-tg