New Features in the Loyalty Commerce Platform

[Jeff Byrne]

It's been a busy few months here at Points for the LCP team but we've rolled out some features that should be useful while developing apps. Here's a short summary of some of these changes.

Sandbox MVs

While testing your app you will inevitably get to the point where you'd like to try out a Member Validation (MV) in Sandbox mode. It is now possible to get some pre-defined MV requests that can be used in Sandbox mode with known responses. In the example in our documentation you can see the following response:

{
  "links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "https://lcp.points.com/v1/lps/<lp-id>/mvs/metadata/sandbox-responses"
    }
  },
  "sandboxResponses": [
    {
      "request": {
        "identifyingFactors": {
          "firstName": "Tony",
          "lastName": "Smith",
          "memberId": "99999999"
        },
        "authenticatingFactors": {
          "password": "PASSWORD"
        }
      },
      "response": {
         "error": "INVALID_UPSTREAM_RESPONSE"
      }
    },
    {
      "request": {
        "identifyingFactors": {
          "firstName": "Joe",
          "lastName": "Smith",
          "memberId": "12345678"
        },
        "authenticatingFactors": {
          "password": "ABCDEFGH"
        }
      },
      "response": {
        "balance": 205123
      }
    },
    ...
  ]
}

This gives two different requests that can be used to trigger different behaviours; one for an upstream response to test failure scenarios, and one for a successful validation returning a member balance.

Sandbox Permissions

All applications, when promoted to Live mode, are granted permission only to the LPs they need access to but in Sandbox mode apps by default can see and use all LPs. If you'd like to limit the LPs your app has access to you can grant your own Sandbox permissions restricting what your app has access to in order to better mirror what Live mode would be like.

Filter LPs by Name

When working with a specific LP within the LCP you will need to know the ID of that loyalty program. You can find this ID value by retrieving the list of LPs in the platform. Rather than trawling through every loyalty program it is much simpler to search for the specific one you're looking for. Up until recently it was only possible to search based off the name of the partner (such as Southwest) but we've now added the ability to search by the loyalty program name (such as Rapid Rewards) as well making it easier to find what you're looking for.

These are just a few of the new features we've rolled out, stay tuned for more in the coming months!

Jeff Byrne

Product Manager, Loyalty Commerce Platform