These are the questions commonly asked by previous suppliers during onboarding. Hope this page would be helpful for you to understand the switch API and reporting API better. If you have any other questions not in this page, please do not hesitate to contact Uswitch tech team.
Q: Do you have a test environment?
A: Yes. We have staging environment (identical to production) you can use to play around. We will provide test switches in staging once we start technical integration.
Q: How can I get authentication details?
A: Uswitch tech team would provide the details of client ID and client secret via email. We expect you to generate access token once a day to cache this information to call our API. The access details will be used for both switch API and reporting API.
Q: Is it secure?
A: All data is encrypted using industry best-practice standards while in transit. Your customers’ data will only ever be visible to you, and is secured with your secret key. If you lose your key, we can immediately invalidate it, and issue you with a new one.
Q: We need to ask customer additional questions during the journey (e.g. PSR (Priority Services Register) question), how can we receive these information in Switch API?
A: Please contact Uswitch Operations to talk about additional questions. We would provide the customer answers under “supplementary_information” field in agreed format.
Q: We don’t use campaign code (product code) to define energy tariff. Is that OK?
A: Yes. If you do not have identifier, we will send the tariff name as identifier in payload.
Q: What if I want to see an old switch?
A: You can retrieve details of any switch from the last 90 days. Messages will never change, so you could view the original switch and amendments separately.
Q: How can I see test switches?
A: Once Uswitch team start technical integration to allow your supplier to have fulfilment journey, the test switches will be available.
Q: Do you have an endpoint for the switches I have already acknowledged?
A: No. We do not currently have an endpoint for already acknowledged switches. If you want to see the history of a switch, you need to know the switch reference and use
GET /switching/messages/switch-ref/{switch-reference}endpoint. You should only acknowledge a switch once you have saved the switch details in a database successfully.
Q: For ‘missing-status’ switches after we send Uswitch a switch status, would the switch still be returned in the ‘missing-status’ endpoint?
A: If you have reported back a final status(e.g. live) for a product, then that product should no longer appear in the missing status list.
Q: What’s your expectation in terms of performance for these endpoints?
A: We don’t operate a specific SLA, but for reference we do monitor the API’s latency and the P95 time for posting missing-status is typically about 200ms the P95 time for posting status-facts is typically about 600ms for a single switch. Multiple switches’ statuses will be correspondingly higher.
Q: In staging, I cannot report status using the switch reference, that I have received from switch API. Is this correct?
A: Yes, it is correct. The staging switch API and reporting API environments are separate and have different sets of test switches. In production, the APIs reference a common set of real switches.
Q: How can I test the reporting of loyalty status for a switch?
A: If a supplier has a loyalty agreement with Uswitch there will be some test switches in the staging environment for which loyalty will be considered due. You can retrieve those switch_references and test report against those.
Q: How often should report posting occur?
A: Please see the operational guidance in the reporting API page.