Partner Widget 1.0
Drupal B2B Rest Client
Our third project for HolidayCheck is a B2B application. As the leading provider of hotel ratings in German-speaking countries, HolidayCheck AG makes its enormous database available to tour operators who are partners of the company via REST API. The aim of the project was to offer partners a simpler way to integrate the database into their websites without having to program their own connections to the REST interface.
The Drupal framework proved to be a highly flexible all-rounder: only the partner data (permissions, settings and output styles) is stored in Drupal itself. When the partner widget is called up, Drupal communicates with the Holiday-Check API via the internal HTTP client in order to display the requested information as an HTML document.
Components
The partner widget provides two parts in different languages: the view of hotel reviews (and media, if applicable) and the review section for submitting hotel reviews. HolidayCheck partners can integrate both parts as ready-made HTML into their websites and stores, either as a pop-up window or via iframe. The selection of the partner and the hotel to be displayed is controlled by the URL: one parameter defines the partner, the other the hotel for which information is to be displayed.
Theming and configuration of partners
In the backend, HolidayCheck partners can be created and managed. Each partner has various options for displaying information. For example, font styles and color schemes can be specified according to the corporate design of the respective partner. The output of the partner widget customized for the partner is also controlled here - for example, you can specify whether the respective partner has access to image material or whether hotel reviews can be submitted via their access.
Partner widget data
Drupal module programming: Interface to the API
A specially programmed module makes the requests to the HolidayCheck API. The data record for the requested hotel is retrieved and prepared for output by Drupal. Since calls to the API and the preparation cost resources and, above all, time, a caching mechanism is integrated into the module. The retrieved hotel information can be cached for a freely definable period of time.
When submitting hotel reviews, the data is first recorded and validated by Drupal in a multi-stage form. If the data is all valid, it is then sent to HolidayCheck via POST call by the internal HTTP client to the REST API.
Partner Widget Frontend
Tracking of views and rating submissions
Another Drupal module, which was created for the HolidayCheck Partner Widget, is used to track visits. The calls to the partner widget are recorded for each individual partner so that an evaluation of the use of the service is possible. Separately, it also logs how many reviews were started and how many were actually submitted via the API. All of the logged data can be exported as a CSV file for further processing and archiving.
