Note: The following article is intended primarily for portatour® administrators of company accounts (2 or more users).
We at portatour® are very pleased that many companies use the portatour® Anywhere API to automatically import and export their data on a regular basis.
However, in the course of logfile analyses, we have found that in some cases, that the root causes of faulty API calls are not resolved. This means that the same faulty calls are tried again and again day in and day out.
Due to these errors, which are often due to data inconsistencies in the import file, the API calls fail altogether. The field rep does not receive current data. Often the problem is only identified and remedied days or weeks later, after end users complain.
Today’s update of the portatour® API helps you to quickly detect and solve such errors before users are affected.
If an API call fails, portatour® now automatically sends an e-mail with an exact call and error description to the e-mail address of the administrator account whose credentials were used for the API call. As an administrator, you can promptly begin to remedy the cause. It is important to ensure that the administrator account you are using has the correct e-mail address and that mails sent to that account are also regularly read.
Note: To avoid generating a flood of e-mails for errors that involve many user accounts and therefore many API calls, automatic e-mail delivery is always delayed for at least one minute after a faulty API call. If further faulty API calls happen during this minute, all error messages are combined into a single e-mail and the delivery is delayed further. Therefore, there is no need to be surprised when e-mails always arrive at least one minute later in your mailbox in the event of an error.
At this point, we would like to offer you some reassurance: it is usually a matter of special cases in the data or in the process that were still unknown during the initial programming of the data synchronization via the API or in your program code. The API calls should subsequently go through without errors on an ongoing basis.
Automatic e-mail delivery for errors cannot be deactivated. Fixing the cause of any errors should always be a high priority, otherwise API calls will fail in any event.
Note however that while the e-mail notifications cover many of the possible automation errors, they are not all-encompassing. For example, in the following two problem scenarios, portatour® does not send an e-mail:
- If you use invalid administrator credentials (username + password) in the API call, portatour® cannot identify your e-mail address.
- If there is an error in a preprocessing step on your side and the program flow does not reach the actual API call.
If you need any assistance with API usage, we are happy to provide you an individualized workshop.