Cartell Test VRM Caching for XML and JSON

Cartell Test VRM Caching

Cartell are delighted to announce the general availability of our Test VRM Caching within our standard services. This unique feature is available to our XML/JSON customers that wish to retrieve Cartell Data as part of Development, Test or Monitoring processes and avoid service limits or billing issues.

Our VRM Caching was designed for three main scenarios, firstly to support developers while applications are being developed, secondly to assist with Unit Testing and thirdly to facilitate end to end monitoring of complex customer systems.

Developers

If a developer is developing an API to Cartell they may need to call our API’s many times while working on the code.  With this ability we can supply several registration plates that cover various scenarios. Project managers can rest assured that while these plates are being used, no issues will arise on their account.

Unit Testing

If a Tester is carrying out pre-release integration testing or modifying an existing product that connects to one of our services they may need to run a unit test on their application that may invoke Cartell API’s. With the cached VRM service, specific use cases and logic paths can be accounted for in their scripts e.g. Vehicle Written Off vs a normal vehicle. Test registrations can be supplied that account for these use cases.

System Administrators

In many cases System Administrators carry out live system checks for their own systems on a regular automated basis. For customers that have Cartell services built into these systems it’s quite likely that Cartell API’s will be invoked each time. Over a period of months, these automated tests can invoke our API’s many thousands of times. Using our Test VRM caching administrators can easily include Cartell API processing as part of their end to end processing without incurring billing headaches.

How does it work?

Cartell have created a series of test registration plates that map to actual real vehicles. When any VRM service is called using these plates the service performs a normal vehicle lookup on the mapped vehicle, however, for security, some vehicle identification attributes are masked e.g. VIN. The initial population lookup is billable, but the resulting data is cached for a period of one week. No matter how often the service is called thereafter, lookups are served from cache for the following seven days, none of which are billed. Each customer will get data matching exactly their expected data format. Over time, if the service data configuration changes or the baseline vehicle data changes the cached lookups will update. This means the vehicles and the data will evolve as required without any changes, e.g. The Tax Expiry dates may update, they may change ownership etc.

What do I need to do to enable this?

Very little! Just use the following registration plates in your normal API call. These will automatically work out of the box today and no extra configuration is required beyond using the plate in your environment. In the interest of Fair Usage, Cartell reserves the right to disable this feature or suspend your account if abuse is detected. If you require additional plates that satisfy certain scenarios please contact us.