I am trying to find the equivalent of FQP/FQD/FQN queries in the Amadeus SOAP service (Flight) API, but couldn't find one. I checked the API documents as well with no luck. There is command cryptic API to call the GDS commands, but the response is raw data as in the terminal, not a structured one. I need structured data response to precess data in the system.
Is there any SOAP APIs available to get the fare details and the rules?
Thanks
This is a question best sent to Amadeus directly! It's hard to know exactly what you are after without more information. Also Amadeus offer a wide variety of doing basically the same thing and your business can be better off using one or the other - its really impossible to tell without background information.
Check out these webservice calls:
Fare_PricePNRWithBookingClass
The function Fare_PricePNRWithBookingClass is used to price itineraries.
It can return one or several fare recommendations for the passenger(s) and for the itinerary of the active PNR. Only booking classes present in the flight segment of the PNR are considered.
After calling Fare_PricePNRWithBookingClass function, the system keeps the recommendations stored internally for three minutes in a dedicated context. This context can be used to create a TST by using Ticket_CreateTSTFromPricing.
Fare_PricePNRWithLowerFares
The function Fare_PricePNRWithLowerFares is used to display the lowest available fare for a given itinerary.
"Lowest available" means that this fare is applicable in a booking class where there are still enough seats available for the passengers of the PNR. This class might not be the one currently present in the flight segment of the PNR. In this case, rebooking might be necessary.
It can return one or several fare recommendations for the passenger(s) and for the itinerary of the active PNR.
After calling Fare_PricePNRWithLowerFares function, the system keeps the recommendations stored internally for three minutes in a dedicated context. This context can be used to create a TST by using Ticket_CreateTSTFromPricing. Please not that in case rebooking is required, it must be done (for example, using Air_RebookAirSegment) before TST creation.
Fare_InformativeBestPricingWithoutPNR
The InformativeBestPricingWithoutPNR function provided in the Fare interface is used to price informatively an itinerary without any PNR. If a PNR exists, it is neither taken into account nor updated. No pricing record (TST) is created to store the results.
Fare_QuoteItinerary
The QuoteItinary transaction (FQP) quotes fares for passenger types without existing reservations (PNR). Pricing is executed according to the principles of IATA resolutions as well as according to specific user requirements, if industry conform or individual.
Most likely there are more options available (that I don't know about).
Documentation available at https://webservices.amadeus.com/ - login required.
Related
When I query seat maps for certain flights, I find that much of the seatmap comes back with "blocked" status. I can confirm with various other sources (airline webpage, ExpertFlyer, etc.) that many of the seats showing up as blocked in the Amadeus API are actually open.
One example is the following query for EWR-LHR flights on UA. I run this as a GET query on the flight-offers API and then pass the results to the seat map API.
https://test.api.amadeus.com/v2/shopping/flight-offers?originLocationCode=JFK&destinationLocationCode=LHR&departureDate=2020-12-18&adults=1&nonStop=true&max=250
This comes back with rows 30-35 or so all "BLOCKED" status. Many of these seats are in reality open, but United may charge an extra fee to book them.
Is there a way to show actual seat availability or include the information on seats for purchase? Alternatively, can I specify the booking class in the query somehow? E.g. I wonder if I asked for a higher class of fare (e.g. full-fare Y) maybe no seat charge would be required (not completely familiar with UA's rules on this). Overall my goal is to see all actual available seats.
The SeatMap Display API builds the aircraft seatmap based on specific flight offer. That’s why the information you get for the seat availability depends on the traveler class information. In the Flight Offers Search API you can define with the parameter travelClass the travel class; economy, premium economy, business or first class. Also, in the test environment it's normal to have discrepancies with other sources as the test environment doesn't contain the full and live data.
I am using the Bigcommerce API to develop a small standalone application for a client. I store product information in a local database anytime I fetch products from Bigcommerce, to reduce latency and network load. However, products can change on Bigcommerce, and while it is acceptable for my application to show mildly outdated information, I will need to update my local cache at some point. My current plan is to do this by storing the original date I requested the product, after which I will need to perform another request to refresh the cache.
My question is, given a list of products (including their Bigcommerce IDs), is there a way to request updates to all of them through a single call to the Products Resource? I can make a request for each individual product by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products/{id}
I can also request all products within an unbroken ID range by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products?min_id={value}&max_id={value}
I am able to successfully call both of the above methods, and I can chain them together in loops to fetch all products. What I want to do is request multiple products with unrelated IDs in a single call. So, something like this:
//THIS IS NOT A REAL METHOD!
GET {api}/v2/products?id[]={value1}&id[]={value2}
Is there any way I can do this? Or is there another approach to solving this that I haven't considered? My main requirements are:
Minimal API requests. My application is small but my client's bigcommerce store is not, and I will be processing tens of thousands of products. I have limited CPU and network resources available, and I simply cannot process that many requests.
Scalable. As I said, my client's store is large, and growing. I need a solution whose overhead scales at a manageable rate with number of products.
Note: my application is a small web application written in PHP running on a Linux shared hosting environment. It is a back of house system which will likely only be used by single user at a time, during standard business hours. I haven't tagged the question with PHP because my question is about the API, which is language agnostic.
One approch can be.
First get all products from BigCommerce using simple products call.
Set some interval time to get updated product list.
You can use min_date_modified and max_date_modified OR min_date_created and max_date_created in products API call to get updated products details.
We have an app which is exposing a RESTful API to a UI for purchasing an item. I have a question regarding API design. Lets say the following action should be taken in order
Item to be chosen for purchase
Next give the address to be delivered to
My question is: should we design a single API which gets both data perform both? Or should we design two API calls - one that creates a purchase record and second that update the address to be delivered to?
The recommended SOA approach is to choose coarse-grained services, which would seem to argue the minimum amount of API calls.
However, from a business point of view, item selection and purchase and item delivery are two very different concerns that should be separate components in your architecture. For item selection, you need to consider things like inventory and pricing. For delivery address, you need to consider user address lists, address validation, shipping, and taxation.
Those two components are not likely to interact much except maybe some external association between an item id and address id. For this reason, I'd recommend two API calls. Functionally, this would also allow your API users do things like update the delivery address without re-purchasing an item, send the bill to one address and the item to another address, etc.
As you state that you design a RESTful API you usually start by designing resources instead of the intended calls. Later on, resource representations can be chosen that include other resources for optimised HTTP request counts.
You might want to choose to proceed the following way:
Model the item list resource (GET - lists all items, POST - allows item creation) /items/
Model the address list resource /addresses/
Model the item instance resource /items/item/resourceId
Model the address instance resource /addresses/address/resourceId
Now all of your resources are available you can think about usage patterns. All your resources are generically available and can be mashed up.
Possible approaches to answer your questions would be:
Extend the item instance resource with the needed address details (coarse grained as lreeder stated)
Model a resource /deliverydetails/ as list and instance resource containing item(s) and address, make the deliverydetails to be queried by item id or whatever your use case fits best
Hope that helps!
Btw. you are automatically following SOA approaches with a Resource Oriented Design. Interfaces will be naturally fitting your business requirements and generic enough to support more advanced use cases.
Here is a good example
I'm building my first REST API (at least trying) for a personal project.
In this project there are resources called players which hold can be in a team. According to REST API design rulebook a resource should be made either to be a document or a store and one should keeps these roles as segregated as possible.
Yet I would like to append some metadata to the team resource, eg the date the team was founded. Is it okay then for GET /teams/atlanta to return this metadata (making it a document) alongside the list of players in the team (making it a store).
Is this a good idea? If so why? If not why not and how to solve this better?
I know there are no rules to developing a REST API, but there are good practices and I would like to adhere to those. Please also not that this is really my first REST API so pardon my ignorance if there is any.
I would recommend having GET /teams/atlanta return just the information about the team, such as the founding date that you mention, and then having GET /teams/atlanta/players return the list of players for that team. These distinctions become more important when you are presenting an API that uses HTTP methods other than GET.
For example, if you wanted to add a player to a team - this would be a lot easier if you could just POST a player object to /teams/atlanta/players than if you had to PUT the whole team object to /teams/atlanta every time you wanted to add one individual player.
If your API only allows retrieval of data, and if it is for a specific client application, there is an argument for combining all the team data into one object to save the client having to make additional requests for the data, but bear in mind that it is less flexible.
Your application may want to display a list of teams by calling GET /teams but you probably wouldn't want all of the player information included in each object in the list as this is quite a lot of data, but if GET /teams/atlanta returns player information then it would be inconsistent not to include it in the list version too.
I would personally favour splitting up the resources as I've suggested, and live with the fact the client may need to make an extra request or two.
What would be best practice for the following situation. I have an ecommerce store that pulls down inventory levels from a distributor. Should the site, for everytime a user loads a product detail page use the third party API for the most up to date data? Or, should the site using third party APIs and then store that data for a certain amount of time in it's own system and update it periodically?
To me it seems obvious that it should be updated everytime the product detail page is loaded but what about high traffic ecommerce stores? Are completely different solutions used for that case?
In this case I would definitely cache the results from the distributor's site for some period of time, rather than hitting them every time you get a request. However, I would not simply use a blanket 5 minute or 30 minute timeout for all cache entries. Instead, I would use some heuristics. If possible, for instance if your application is written in a language like Python, you could attach a simple script to every product which implements the timeout.
This way, if it is an item that is requested infrequently, or one that has a large amount in stock, you could cache for a longer time.
if product.popularityrating > 8 or product.lastqtyinstock < 20:
cache.expire(productnum)
distributor.checkstock(productnum)
This gives you flexibility that you can call on if you need it. Initially, you can set all the rules to something like:
cache.expireover("3m",productnum)
distributor.checkstock(productnum)
In actual fact, the script would probably not include the checkstock function call because that would be in the main app, but it is included here for context. If python seems too heavyweiaght to include just for this small amount of flexibilty, then have a look at TCL which was specifically designed for this type of job. Both can be embedded easily in C, C++, C# and Java applications.
Actually, there is another solution. Your distributor keeps the product catalog on their servers and gives you access to it via Open Catalog Interface. When a user wants to make an order he gets redirected in-place to the distributor's catalog, chooses items then transfers selection back to your shop.
It is widely used in SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) branch.
It depends on many factors: the traffic to your site, how often the inventory levels change, the business impact of displaing outdated data, how often the supplers allow you to call their API, their API's SLA in terms of availability and performance, and so on.
Once you have these answers, there are of course many possibilities here. For example, for a low-traffic site where getting the inventory right is important, you may want to call the 3rd-party API on every call, but revert to some alternative behavior (such as using cached data) if the API does not respond within a certain timeout.
Sometimes, well-designed APIs will include hints as to the validity period of the data. For example, some REST-over-HTTP APIs support various HTTP Cache control headers that can be used to specify a validity period, or to only retrieve data if it has changed since last request.