Anonymised Previous Professional Experience
Keeping Data Consistent Across Applications
An integration between a business application and an external commerce platform combined several source records into a single destination record in some cases.
Calculated availability, product attributes and external identifiers needed consistent handling during creation and updates.
The context
The two systems represented some of the same business information differently. The integration converted operational records into product information the commerce platform could use.
The work
- Developed and investigated PHP integration logic.
- Worked with REST API operations.
- Aggregated related source records.
- Calculated destination values from multiple quantities.
- Mapped product variations and attributes.
- Maintained identifiers across both systems.
- Compared creation and update payloads.
- Investigated discrepancies between expected and actual synchronised data.
The difficult part
An API can accept an update whose payload omits a field that the source has already calculated. When several source records correspond to one destination entity, changes to any of those records can affect the value the destination should receive.
What this experience demonstrates
Tracing data transformations across applications, debugging integrations and checking that individual requests reflect the business rules shared by both systems.