Best Practices

Follow these recommendations to build a reliable and maintainable integration with the eCourtDate API.

Integration Guidelines

1. Test in staging first. Use staging.api.ecourtdate.com to validate your integration before pointing to a production region.

2. Log HTTP response status codes and bodies. Capture every response for debugging. This is critical when troubleshooting failed requests.

3. Retain UUIDs from responses. Store the uuid returned by every create operation. Use PATCH with the uuid for subsequent updates instead of creating new records.

4. Use client_reference and event_reference. Assign human-readable reference values to client and event records so they can be easily located and correlated with your internal systems.

5. Implement retry logic for transient errors. Automatically retry on 429, 503, and 504 responses using exponential backoff (see Rate Limits).

6. Set up alerts for integration errors. Monitor for 400, 401, and 403 responses. These indicate configuration or credential issues that require immediate attention.

7. Monitor Console logs regularly. Review API activity and errors in the eCourtDate Console under the Logs section.

8. Use automated templates for recurring messages. Reserve one-off messages for ad-hoc communications only.

9. Use send_now: true only when needed. This flag requires the agency to have Default Message Delay set to 0 and Send Immediately enabled in settings.

10. Track message delivery. Check delivery status and engagement using:

    • GET /messages/{uuid}/metas for delivery metadata.
    • GET /opens?message={uuid} for open tracking.

Monitoring and Reporting

Resource	URL
Reports	https://app.ecourtdate.com/reports
Dashboards	https://app.ecourtdate.com/dashboards
Campaign Status	https://billing.ecourtdate.com/campaigns
Issue Notifications	General Settings > Issues Emails in the Console