Re: [Dev.team] Unbilled Messages

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 16 Sep 2010, at 15:42, Dhavelin Chetty wrote:

> I have asked Vodacom, but will only get a response tomorrow morning.
>  
> Can we not store the EXACT response we get from the network instead of 
> combining them. This will solve allot of these types of delays as right now, 
> we don’t know if it failed at Vodacoms end or ours.

Not so that it would be searchable/comprehensible.

The reason for this is that the Vodacom billing API is ridiculously complex ... 
for a successful billing you need a minimum of *four* different calls to their 
system.
For each call their system returns multiple data items in the response ... 
mostly only one of those items needs to be checked to determine success/failure 
of that particular call, but sometimes you need to check two values.
Sometimes a response basically means 'we haven't finished yet, check again 
later' ... so we need to call the billing system again ... an indefinite umber 
of times.
By contrast, for the other network operators a billing transaction is a single 
operation with a single result code.

So to understand what happened with a vodacom billing operation you would 
basically need a full audit trail ... and you couldn't really use a database to 
query it for what happened.
When we have full debug enabled, we have all that information, but to piece 
together the events for a particular billing operation is then basically a slow 
manual job.