This appendix summarizes the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) application programming interfaces (APIs).
For detailed information about each API, see BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.
Important:
The ECE data model within the Coherence cache is subject to change. Oracle does not recommend that client applications directly use the Coherence API or the query tool for accessing ECE cache data. For querying ECE cache data, write your client applications to use the ECE APIs such as the balance query and authentication query APIs.Client applications such as online mediation system applications must obtain data relevant to the subscriber from ECE in order to process requests from the network. ECE offers services that expose its client APIs so that applications can obtain information from ECE for further processing.
See the following topics for information about services that expose the ECE APIs:
Note:
For detailed information about these services, such as roles, input and output parameters, and errors or exceptions, see the BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.Use the authentication API to query the login and password of subscribers.
Use the login and password information for:
Implementing authentication methods outside of the ECE charging server
Allowing subscribers to validate their login and password credentials against a charge offer to which they are subscribed
For detailed information about the authentication API, see the documentation for oracle.communication.brm.charging.messages.query in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.
Use the balance API to query subscriber balances.
Use the subscriber balance for:
Making policy decisions
Sending the balance information to subscribers so they can monitor their network-usage expenses, validate their credit limit, or monitor their active reservation
When building a balance query request, you have the option to use the following balance query modes to restrict the contents of the balance query response that ECE returns:
SUMMARY
When using the SUMMARY balance query mode, the balance query response contains only the total balance at the balance element level.
DETAILED
When using the DETAILED balance query mode, the balance query response contains the detailed balance for each of the balance elements; this includes balance element specification information (such as credit profile and threshold information) and reservation information (such as the active and consumed reservation).
The balance query response mode you use may impact the overall performance of your system.
For detailed information about the balance API, see the documentation for oracle.communication.brm.charging.messages.query in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.
The ECE charging API supports the following operation types:
Initiate
Update
Terminate
Cancel
Debit_Unit
Debit_Amount
Refund_Unit
Refund_Amount
PriceEnquiry
StartAccounting
UpdateAccounting
AccountingOn
AccountingOff
For detailed information about the charging API, see the documentation for the following packages in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference:
oracle.communication.brm.charging.brs
oracle.communication.brm.charging.messages
For information about how the charging API is called, see "About Charging Operation Types".
The notification framework publishes external notifications, the data in which can be used by external applications for further processing. For example, ECE can publish an external notification when a balance breaches a credit threshold value. A client application could use this information for sending an email to the customer informing the customer that a credit threshold has been breached.
See the discussion about notifications in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Concepts for information about the external notifications published by the notification framework.
Use the policy management API to support policy-driven charging.
ECE offers a policy management API for supporting Sp and Sy reference-point policy and control operations. For more information, see "Integrating Policy Clients with ECE".
For detailed information about the ECE policy management API, see the documentation for the following packages in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference:
oracle.communication.brm.charging.brs
oracle.communication.brm.charging.messages.policy
Use the custom plug-in API to implement a custom plug-in for formatting rated events into the format required by an external system.
A sample custom plug-in is available in the ECE SDK package. The sample is called SampleRatedEventFormatterCustomPlugin.java.
For detailed information about the custom plug-in API, see the documentation for oracle.communication.brm.charging.ratedevent.custom.CustomPlugin in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.
Use the top-up API to send top-up amounts to ECE for updating the customer's balance.
See "Integrating Top-Up Clients with ECE" for more information.
For detailed information about the top-up API, see the documentation for oracle.communication.brm.charging.brs in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.