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Hi Team,

Good day.

I am working on a usecase to enable Stock Management API to expose the stock level amount for a hardware product, which will be consumed by ordering channel. In our case, we have 2 ways to capture the stock inventory details:

1. Logisics supplier creates the product stock item in our inventory DB by doing the create product stock operation using our API. This is done in batches every 15min. Supplier runs a batch to push the stock level amount for all the products whose inventory levels changed in last 15min by calling the create/update product stock. Therefore, inventory DB maintained at our side gets refreshed every 15min.
2. Logistics supplier also has an API exposed which our microservice can query and fetch the real-time data.

When customer is browsing through products in ordering channel, plan is to present the cached(15min delayed) data which shows whether stock is available or not. And when product is added to cart by customer and order is about to be submitted, a real-time lookup of product stock is required.

For the ordering channel, we are planning to expose a Check Product Stock API where product identifiers could be passed (SKU, characteristics). Based on an identifier, we need to identify whether a cached data can be returned for the product stock item or a real-time lookup to supplier is required. 

When looked at TMF687 spec, there is an attribure stockLevelCategory which I was thinking to use for this scenario. When stockLevelCategory is passed as "cached", the microservice could lookup the inventory DB and respond with product stock item sourced from supplier batches. When stockLevelCategory is passed as "real-time", then microservice will make an API call to supplier and fetch the actual stock level. Could you please suggest whether this approach is ok? Or is there a better way to handle this scenario?

Hi,

Could you please suggest on the above?

#General