Certification steps

Certification is the fourth step of the integration journey: the last checkpoint before your integration reaches real hotels. On most APIs, the scenarios follow what your integration does, and you agree them with your D-EDGE Connectivity Project Manager. On the Channel Manager API, D-EDGE calls the endpoints you host, so the scenarios are D-EDGE’s own and published in advance as test scenarios. Over the project you expose two sets of endpoints: your test environment, used in both test phases, and your production environment, handed over for the pilot. Before the tests start, D-EDGE asks you to describe your platform in the questionnaire: its answers decide which scenarios apply to you.

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Hand-over: endpoints and test hotel

Once your four interfaces are built, hand your D-EDGE Connectivity Project Manager everything the tests need.

• The URLs of your four endpoints (Get hotel, Planning updates, Get bookings, and Confirm bookings) on your test environment.
• The credentials you defined for D-EDGE, hotel-level or master.
• A test hotel on your platform that reflects a typical configuration, with at least three room types and three rates in total, one room carrying at least two rates.
• Your completed questionnaire.

Two optional items speed the tests up. Administrator access to your test hotel lets the D-EDGE team check what your platform received without asking you. A booking engine on that hotel lets them create the bookings the booking tests need. Before you hand over, run the test scenarios collection against your test environment: it sends the phase one requests and tells you what D-EDGE will see.

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Phase one: basic behaviour

D-EDGE runs the phase one scenarios against your test environment, without Push bookings. It checks the four interfaces you host one by one, from the checks every response must pass to the content of the bookings you return. After each session, D-EDGE reports the scenarios that failed. You fix them, tell your D-EDGE Connectivity Project Manager, and D-EDGE runs the session again. Phase one takes up to three test sessions.

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Phase two: live certification

Once phase one passes, D-EDGE sets up the connection on its side and links its own test hotel to yours, in production conditions. This is when you receive the Push bookings URL and its Basic Auth credentials: they stay the same from this point through production. Have your Push bookings client ready, since the live session exercises it. During the live session, planning updates (availability, prices, restrictions) must arrive in real time, and bookings, modifications, and cancellations must be integrated as they happen, with the right content. Phase two takes up to two live sessions. Your integration is certified when every scenario that applies to you passes. Your D-EDGE Connectivity Project Manager confirms it and clears the integration for the pilot.

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Pilot: production endpoints

The pilot connects three to five pilot hotels in production. Before it starts, hand over the production side of your integration.

• The URLs of your four endpoints on your production environment, on HTTPS with a valid certificate and TLS 1.2 or higher.
• Your production credentials, under the same credential model as in test.
• The list of the pilot hotels. Each one then requests the connection as described in Connect a new hotel.

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Change your implementation

Your integration keeps evolving after the pilot. Tell your D-EDGE Connectivity Project Manager by email before you ship anything that touches the connection. New fields in your messages, another price model, a new endpoint URL, a move to another version, a change of infrastructure: they all count. Allow at least one month before the release, so that D-EDGE reviews the change with you and updates the connection where it needs to. Card details are the clearest example. A platform that starts sending them on a connection with no PCI routing raises a security alert at D-EDGE. The connection then has to be reworked: D-EDGE reviews the cases where you send a card, checks your XML, and whitelists your domain for the booking pull. Announcing the change first turns that into a planned step. See Card data.

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Next steps