Consumer Interaction Experience API

The contents of this page summarizes various best practices that should be considered when designing and developing applications against the API.

Fault Handling
This section lists some helpful tips about how client applications can resolve faults and common issues they may encounter while making requests against the API

1. Most errors can be resolved by allowing short pause between requests.
2. Implementing retry logic.
3. Implementing failure logic on multiple retries.

Message Payload Size management
Using GZIP compression is one way of achieving this
- it increases the speed of data requests
- Easily implemented by adding HTTP headers

Randomize Refresh Rates
Add some randomization to the consumer application refresh times.

Test against the QA environment for development.
It is important to restrict testing during application development to the QA environment; this is to ensure that a smooth service can be provided to other users in the production environment.
The 2.6 QA API should only be used to test the format of data not specific brand-market requests. After development is complete any new brand-market onboarding can be tested in production.

Content Negotiation
It is important to specify the content-type required for the API call responses, for example set your content-type: header to application/json
[Currently only JSON content-types are supported].

Persistent Connections
It's recommended to use persistent connections as they improve the performance by removing the overhead of creating new connections.
A consideration to take into account is to make sure that the client re-uses its connections to prevent a situation where they are exhausted.

It is suggested to use connection pools where possible.