There are many situations where your FAK/CFS container availability information should be integrated with Inbound Connect.
These include being visible in the national LCL Availability Search, validation of availability during booking flows and also for storage alerting and management.
- Direct integration to your existing warehouse management system or publicly visible availability information.
- We have a large number of integrations to existing systems. Please check with us first if we have an integration to your system.
- Using our ContainerAvailability API, which is described more in this document.
- Using our CSV based email address, which is described more in this document.
- Generate an API key for a user (or create a generic integration user first) within your facility account.
- Construct a payload based on the API payload format tab and send it in to our API endpoint.
- The system will automatically add the container availability information to the system.
For step 3 above, when using our CSV based email service, the integration is as follow:
- Contact Inbound Connect Support to obtain your unique code to include the CSV file.
- Construct a CSV file matching the specifications shown in the CSV Payload Format tab.
- Send that file to the email address provided to you by Inbound Connect Support in step 1 above.
Endpoint
The facility attachment API URL will be provided by your Inbound Connect account or support team member. Please contact them to get the URL.
Security
To authenticate to the Inbound Connect API, you first need to generate an API token for a user with permissions to edit bookings. You can either create a generic user with just this permission, or use an existing user.
- Once logged in as the user in question.
- Go to the My Settings menu in the top right of the screen.
- Select the API Keys tab and click New API Key.
- Copy down the API key as once the window is closed you won’t be able to retrieve it again and you will be required to generate a new key.
- To all HTTP requests to the Inbound Connect endpoint ensure you have the following HTTP Header added.
- Inbound-API-Key: <emailaddress>:<apikey>
- Where email address is the email address of the user within your facility account
- And apikey is the value copied from step 4 above.
Field Descriptions
| Field | Description | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| containerNumber | The container number you are specifying availability for | |
| vesselName | Name of the vessel the container came in on. | |
| voyageNumber | The voyage this container came in on. | |
| availableDateTime | The date/time this container becomes available | yyyy-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ss format (ISO 8601) in local time to the facility |
| firstDateOfStorage | The date/time that storage will commence on this container. | yyyy-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ss format (ISO 8601) in local time to the facility |
Example
[
{
"containerNumber": "MSKU1234565",
"vesselName": "MAERSK TEST",
"voyageNumber": "123S",
"availableDateTime": "2024-01-01T15:00:00",
"firstDateOfStorage": "2024-01-05T15:00:00",
},
{
"containerNumber": "CMAU1234565",
"vesselName": "CMA TEST",
"voyageNumber": "123S",
"availableDateTime": "2024-01-01T15:00:00",
"firstDateOfStorage": "2024-01-05T15:00:00",
},
]
The file should be prepared as a CSV file with a .csv file name attachment. You can send multiple files per email if required.
There should be no header information within the file. The first row in the file is treated as data and if you have CSV column headers the file will be rejected.
The format of the CSV should follow the below. The CSV file format does not support a time component to the date fields.
The format of the date fields should be dd/MM/yyyy (if you wish to use ISO 8601 date formats please use the API integration approach)
TenantCode, ContainerNumber, AvailabilityDate, StorageStartDate, VoyageNo, VesselName
Example
Filename: availabity.csv "MYCODEHERE","MSKU1234565","2024-01-01T15:00:00","2024-01-05T15:00:00","123S","MAERSK TEST" "MYCODEHERE","ABCU1234565","2024-01-01T15:00:00","2024-01-05T15:00:00","123S","MAERSK TEST"