-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 59
New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
Checks if the VIES service is online and available #83
Comments
This was also referenced in ticket #64 and what I learned from it was that it's only for testing purposes for client implementations. But you're absolutely right, this is a good addition for checking if the service is up and running. Awesome 👍 |
As far as I understand the main problem they have with uptime is that VIES is only an aggregator service, which then dispatches to country-based services depending on the VAT number you are validating. They don't have a centralized database. This means VIES can be "up" but validating a certain number will fail because that country's service is down. This is also shown on http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/help.html (see Unavailability Shifts). Therefore I am not sure what the value is of knowing that VIES itself is up, as calling it might still fail.. IMO you are better off calling when you need it and retrying later if it fails. |
@Seldaek I will have to check but since the service requires to send a country code along with the test vatNumbers (100, 200) maybe it actually checks the corresponding country database and not just the VIES service itself. It should be easy to verify since the technical breaks for different counties are on different time of day. http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/help.html VIES monitors all member states and You can see the current status here: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/monitoring.html |
I have taken a look at this request to access the integration test service of VIES which were made in issue #64 and issue #83. I can conclude that yes, it is possible to access this test service of VIES for integration tests (issue #64), but I was not able to verify if a backend service of VIES was not accessible. In my test case I used Germany as it was supposed to be "DE-Germany Unavailable daily from 11:00 PM to 01:30 AM" as was stated on https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/help.html. But on https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/monitoring.html it shows green. Not sure if the information in the help page is still accurate since my normal and test SOAP calls all succeeded.
@krzaczek @Seldaek I've tested it locally and also by adding functionality to access the test integration service of VIES (see #109), but even for all countries I get no issues accessing them during "unavailable" time mentioned at the VIES help page. So, my guess is that at this point we need to monitor the downtime of a backend service to see how VIES responds. The heartbeat functionality was created during the time VIES Soap service was taken offline for maintenance. So yes, VIES did go down from time-to-time. |
Haha 😃 I got one… German VIES just failed on me while running automated tests.
Maybe I should put a |
There seems to be a new endpoint we could use to check if the VIES service is up and running.
I'll will try to implement it.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: