API Marketplace Fix (Following Elia API Updates)

Provider updates made to some of the APIs on our portal earlier this year caused them to suddenly stop working for our Marketplace users. One of re.alto’s developers quickly explored the reasons why and successfully found a solution for our users, resolving the issue efficiently for those actively using the APIs. More below.

The re.alto API Marketplace enables consumers to find and integrate with third-party energy data via APIs and offers providers a platform to easily advertise and sell their data. In the rare case that access to an API no longer functions as it should, re.alto’s developers will resolve the issue as soon as possible. A recent example of this was when one of the providers on our marketplace, Elia, made changes to the structure of their APIs earlier this year, leading to some technical issues for those trying to call the APIs from the re.alto platform. The issue was flagged and re.alto quickly began investigating and working towards a solution. 

The issue occurred on 22nd May 2024 when Elia changed their public APIs to make them more powerful with the downside that the APIs became fragmented. The Elia databases are very large, and they greatly improved the versatility of their APIs by updating them to enable users to be far more specific when filtering for data, something which is quite rare in APIs and offers the user far more control in specifying exactly which dataset they want to view. With such a large amount of data available (quarter-hourly data, minutely data, historical data, near real-time etc.), this separating of the data via different URLs based on time frame makes the quantity of data far more manageable for many of the users seeking a specific dataset. Normally, users would receive a large amount of data and then have to filter it themselves on their end, depending on their needs. Via Elia, users can now filter the desired data before receiving that data (for example group it, order it, offset it, limit it). This gives more power and control to the user. But in making the APIs more versatile, the data was split up into new categories, with the consequence being that users now needed to use several different URLs to separate databases to obtain the same kind of data that was previously available through a single URL. Via Elia, users are now required to make calls to different APIs depending on the date, time frame and type of data that is required. For example, Elia has now split their Imbalance Prices API (one of the more popular ones on our marketplace) into six separate APIs, depending on the date/type of data required. There are imbalance prices per quarter hour and per minute as near real-time data but also as historical data, and some of these categories are then split into different tables again depending on whether the data is from before or after the changes were implemented on 22. May 2024 (for example, historical data before or after this date). So, where there used to be one API for this huge amount of data, the data is now found in various data tables each reached via a different API/URL. The update to the APIs on Elia’s side made our implementation of the Elia APIs suddenly unusable because the URL had changed and the data had been split into many different tables. 

The question re.alto then faced was how we could continue to provide this data through our marketplace without our customers having to do multiple API calls to various separate data tables on Elia’s side. The users of re.alto’s marketplace value simplicity in obtaining data. We wanted to resolve the issue by keeping the API as simple and familiar to use as possible for our users and therefore maintain the value in our implementation. Before the changes, users could specify the day they wanted data from, and the API would provide all the data from this date. While updating the URL in our API gateway would have been a simple fix, we would have then had to add various APIs to the marketplace to cover all the same data that the single API had provided access to previously, due to it now being found in different data tables at Elia. Instead, we wanted to provide value to our users by simplifying the API calls so that the data from multiple data tables would be consolidated back into one single endpoint without having to take those different data tables into account on their end. One of our developers updated the API definition and programmed our gateway to pull the requested data from various Elia data tables by configuring a branching redirect to the various tables dependent on the date given as a parameter. This means that data from various data tables is still available on re.alto via one single connection, keeping it simple for our users. Thanks to re.alto’s development team, our users can just continue to specify the required date/time frame and they will see all of the expected data as before. The simplicity of calling these APIs has therefore been maintained for our marketplace users, meaning the changes from a user perspective are now minimal. 

If you’d like to learn more about our API Marketplace or our IoT connectivity solutions, please reach out via the contact us page on our website. 

(The Imbalance Prices API is now split into six via Elia.)

Image source: Elia