FAQs

Hello! This page will be helpful to you if you’re Barchart employee or an ERP partner that we’re just starting to work with. Let’s go through the different progressions we’ll work through together.

Are you an agribusiness? You’ll probably find the answers you’re look for right here

1 Getting Started
- 1.1 Discovery
- 1.2 Follow-up
- 1.3 Ingestion Examples
2 FAQs

Getting Started

Discovery

This is the getting to know you phase. Generally we’re going to want to ask the following questions to better understand your capabilities.

General data access:

How do you typically deliver this type of data (Contracts, Customers, Settlements and Balances) outside of your ERP system?
Do you have an API for 3rd party integrations?
Is your API REST based? JSON or XML output format?
Maybe flat files via SFTP?
Do you have documentation available on this API?
Do you have a sandbox/testing environment available for development?

Webhooks (HTTP POST) Integration:

Do you support a push (HTTP POST) style delivery mechanism (e.g. on data changes they would send us updates)?
Have you seen our sample data models?
Do they have technical questions or need access to a sandbox for this type of integration? Contact marketplace@barchart.com.

Follow-up

After the Discovery emails / calls we’ll follow-up with some more detail on how we can start working together. Here’s an example of what we might send to you . The relevant attachments are below the code snippet

Hi [Provider],

Thanks for the call today. Attached is a brief rundown of the ingestion interface on our side - also attached are some example JSON models.

Here is a Postman example of the Update API (HTTP POST): https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/4988380/TVYNXuxD

Update HTTP Endpoint
https://gar.aws.barchart.com/api/v1/providers/[Provider]/update

API Key
[Insert any GUID from here (and save it somewehre): https://www.guidgenerator.com/]

Example CURL
curl --request POST 'https://gar.aws.barchart.com/api/v1/providers/[Provider]/update' \
--header 'x-api-key: [GUID]' \
--header 'x-customer-context: an-elevator-company' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
  "key": "any JSON body format is accepted"
}'  
To start, the API will just echo back what you POST to it, once we have the official JSON structure for your document entities we can start the indexing process on our side.

Any questions just let us know.

[Attach barchart_models.zip] [Attach Accounting_Ingestion.pdf]

Ingestion Examples

How quickly can you integrate with our ERP system?

Pretty quickly actually. The system we built is very flexibly, and as long as your models are inline with what we’ve seen from other providers, then we can likely make demonstrable progress in a week or two. Once you provide some additional information from the section above we can provide a more precise estimate.

Wait, so we can provide you anything and you turn it around in a week or two?

Not exactly. If you are providing us with models we’ve already normalized and integrated then it’s not a problem to adopt your models to our schema. If we’re supporting a new model type or need to do support a different way to get the information from you, then it’s going to take longer. But we’re pretty good at this so let’s knock this out together.

How much work is it to onboard an additional elevator after we complete an integration?

It’s super easy! All the ERP provider needs to do is to set a header (x-company-context), which allows us to switch on companies inside a provider, while allowing them to keep the same API key. This way, only very small changes on our side are required for onboarding

So how can we work together to add a new elevator? What steps need to be taken?

Glad you asked. Here are the steps

Use the same API key and endpoint that you currently push information to us with
Set x-customer-context to the name of the company being onboarded, for example:
1. x-customer-context: stone-grain
2. x-customer-context: superior-grain-buyers
Send an email to marketplace@barchart.com who will forward to our development team for processing

That’s it! Just watch that beautiful grower data start flowing