Editing downtime.dat with an external program

[Edson Manners]

Using - Nagios 2.10
RHEL 5

Hi everyone,
   I'm in the process of creating an external webpage in PHP that allows 
our team to set bulk downtimes after, say, a round of MS patches.

I am at the point where my PHP page outputs the following for each host 
chosen with the idea that it'll be appended to downtime.dat:

hostdowntime {
       host_name=nagios.fsu.edu
       downtime_id=11
       entry_time=1201704159
       start_time=1201704115
       end_time=1201711315
       triggered_by=0
       fixed=1
       duration=7200
       author=Edson Manners
       comment=Blahh
       }


This is in the format of the downtime.dat file. However the top of the 
downtime.dat file warns that it should not be modified but by nagios 
itself. Is there some API supported way to add downtime to nagios using 
external programs or is this the way to do it?
Thanks
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