Conventions

HTTPS Interface Enforcement

The PharmX Gateway 3 interface will enforce secure communications between all client software and the Gateway. Consequently, HTTPS must be used for all communications. Insecure communications using the standard http protocol will not be supported for the Gateway 3 interface.

Standardised Response Structure

All responses will be received in a defined structure with an indication of success or failure for the particular web method call, an error message if applicable, and either a document ID or a gateway object as a property of the response.

This crucial difference to previous web service implementations will allow the developer to distinguish between a http or timeout error (indicating a failover event has occurred) and an application or data-related error where a failover is unlikely to be appropriate.

Message Quality Standards

All messages submitted to the gateway 3 interface will be subjected to enhanced data quality checks. Any messages not meeting gateway 3 data quality standards will be downgraded and tagged as gateway 2 data standard. The subsequent forwarding of these messages will indicate to the receiver the data standard the message has passed, thereby allowing a more reliable application of processing methodologies by the receiver.

Fields storing dollar amounts and dates will also be expressed with a standard default value if no meaningful data has been provided by the sender/system:

1. All dollar amounts expressed to nearest 0.1 of a cent i.e. “0.000”

2. All datetime values not populated by the sender will be expressed as “1990-01-01T00:00:00Z”

UTC Date Times Values

All inbound and outbound datetime values will be expressed as UTC time, as opposed to local time, i.e. all date and times are assumed to be in ISO 8601 format. Combined date and time fields are based on RFC3339 (an ISO 8601 profile).

Values will be expressed with a level of precision to the nearest second, i.e. complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds.

Request Date Time Values

Values should include the time zone offset for the sending system.

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD

e.g. 2018-12-11T11:24:51+11:00 corresponding to December 11, 2018, 11:24:51 am, Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT).

Response Date Time Values

The gateway will return UTC date/times.

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ

e.g. 2018-12-11T00:24:51Z corresponding to December 11, 2018, 11:24:51 am, in UTC format.