Carrier Country Service Mapping (CCSM)
This Concept supports in defining, checking & reassuring the presence of values needed for specific carrier & country combinations.
Overview & Idea
While Carrier companies such as DHL or FedEx serve the same business (in a nutshell: transporting goods from A to B) their APIs and Interfaces look and behave very differently. The access is very unique from carrier to carrier and also the provided information varies - even within the interface of the same carrier but with different source or destination countries.
In fulfillmenttools we use Carrier Country Service Mappings (or: CCSMs for short) in order to tackle this situation. They aim at easing the implementation of clients that gather all the information needed before even requesting a parcel label. In a way they serve as a template for successful label requests of an arbitrary order contents.
Description
A CCSM is definable per Carrier. The information it holds is structured in the following way:
Taking a look at the example above the following statements are useful to understand the concept:
For carriers operated by fulfillmenttools you do not need to set any CCSM - it is provided by fulfillmenttools
A carrier can have multiple or none Carrier Country Service Mappings. In case it does not have a set configuration for a needed source/destination combination increases the possibility of issues during runtime due to clients not knowing which data needs to be present
A CCSM can have one source but multiple destinations to allow for configurations like "for every parcel with carrier X from Germany to France, the US, Canada or Sweden the following configuration is valid". This eases the configuration of new carriers and their often similar configuration
Example
Let's find out about the CCSMs of a carrier provided by fulfillmenttools. We start by retrieving the ID of the carrier we are interested in:
In this example the response looks like this:
We are facing a system with 13 configured carriers. We will take a look at INTEX in this example which is used for sending from germany to germany.
Let's fetch the CCSMs für said carrier
As you can see:
For parcels from Germany to Germany (indicated by ISO code "DE" and further definable into postalcodes (not used here)) there are
two required attributes for each parcel called "Start pickup time" and "End pickup time" which define a time window for picking up the shipment.
Furthermore you need to have the Quantity and Value of each shipped line (used to calculate insurance & helps to select this carrier automatically in specific cases) as well as
the overall Value of the parcel.
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