This guide describes how a CPO or EMSP can integrate their data (e.g. POIs or prices) into the Chargeprice system.
The easiert and quickest way to integrate your POIs into Chargeprice is via the industry-standard OCPI. This requires the CPO to provide an OCPI-compliant API, where Chargeprice connects to the Locations module. The current supported versions are 2.2.1 and 2.1.1.
This is right now also the only option to integrate live status (availability of a POI) into Chargeprice.
If OCPI is not an option (e.g. CPO is not roaming and has no EVSE Party ID), Chargeprice can also integrate your custom API.
Here the CPO needs to provide Chargeprice documentation and access to an API hosted by the CPO.
Since this requires developments by Chargeprice, such an integration takes more time than OCPI. Also live status is not supported yet.
If you don’t install POIs frequently, there is also the option to provide Chargeprice with a CSV file of POIs, that can be imported manually.
In order to ensure up-to-date data, this manual import needs to repeated either with every newly installed station, or periodically (e.g. every quarter).
Since this requires manual work on a regular basis, this option is discouraged.
Additionally the manual import is strictly restricted to the following CSV format. CSVs in any other format are not accepted by Chargeprice.
Since there are different types of tariffs out there, there are different options, depending on the complexity and structure of the tariff:
These tariffs are usually not very complex, additionally they usually also only change a few times per year. In such cases a technical integration via API usually causes too much overhead.
Hence it’s sufficient if the EMSP communicates price changes to Chargeprice via email.
In order to display the prices at all supported CPOs, the EMSP should provide Chargeprice with a simple list of supported EVSE Operator IDs (e.g. “AT*ION”).
Such tariffs usually consist of multiple hundreds or thousands of price definitions, which might change on a regular basis.
In order to integrate such tariffs into Chargeprice, the EMSP needs to provide an API with the prices, that Chargeprice can consume:
Note: In case the prices don’t change regularly, the data might also be exchanged manually via email in the same CSV format as the API.
In some cases the above integration isn’t possible, e.g. if the EMSP provides more dynamic prices that change very often. Here there is also the option for a custom API integration. Since this requires developments by Chargeprice, such an integration takes more time.