Availabilities
Availability requests are made through Redeam by channels and resellers. Often, these requests are made immediately before a hold is placed, to confirm that availability is present prior to making the initial hold request. These "last-minute" availability requests are usually for a single point in time, or for a brief duration (a few hours to a day), and can be made frequently for popular products.
Less frequently, channels and resellers may request weeks, months or even a year of availabilities for a product. This is often done to cache the availabilities locally, providing a faster experience for clients on their platform.
To help ensure low response times on availability requests, Redeam provides a pass-through cache, which will conditionally returned cached values, but always passes the availability request through to the reservation system.
Channels & resellers can make availability requests through Redeam with a configurable maximum-age property.
If any availabilities are cached that match the parameters of the request, and are older than the maximum-age, the cache will wait and attempt to deliver the reservation system's response directly to the caller.
- If the reservation system takes too long to respond*, Redeam will return any data available in the cache back to the client (even if no data is available).
Otherwise, the cached availabilities are returned immediately.
In both scenarios, Redeam will wait for the reservation system to respond with availabilities, and update its cache with the received values.
By default, Redeam's availability cache will wait up to three seconds for an availability response before defaulting to the cached value - the configured wait duration is specific to the reseller or channel making the request.
Each successful change notification request (submitted through the Channel Management API) will query the reservation system for 90 days worth of availability.