Engineering Update | November 2019

Dear Consumer Data Right participants and other interested parties,

Product Comparator

The Engineering team are pleased to announce the release of the Product Comparator. The Product Comparator is a reference example demonstrating how the Standards API could be used to view and compare banking products in a web app. A hosted version of the tool can be found here. The source code for the project is in the Engineering team's Git repo.

Upcoming Releases

CDS Engineering team have established a schedule for the release of new features and enhancements in the upcoming months. Two major releases can be anticipated: a November 30 release and a January 30 release. These releases will focus on extending the Parameterised Test Tool and enhancing both the Reference Data Recipient and Reference Data Holder implementations.

November 30 Release

The November 30 Release will include updates to both the Parameterised Test Tool and the Reference Client to incorporate support for all protected Standards endpoints. The tools will include a simulated consent/InfoSec layer, with an option for testers to supply an access token that grants authorisation to the protected endpoints. These pre-created access tokens will be required to be supplied by the DH, and will give the test tool access to a unique combination of data attributes (e.g. client ID, Scopes, sharing duration). The upgrade will also allow testers to supply a client TLS certificate for MTLS with the DH.

This release will not incorporate integration with the registry (simulated or real), nor will it include any user consent model.

The tools have been architected with extension in mind, and have been developed using industry standard testing frameworks (JUnit and Serenity BDD). For further information on customising the tools, please see the contributing.md.

January 30 Release

The January 31 Release will include updates to the Reference DR (client) and Reference DH that incorporate a consent model. The client will be upgraded to prompt for user consent, request an authorisation code from the DH, and exchange the code for an access token (as per the InfoSec profile).

Cadence

The Engineering team have established a weekly delivery cadence: at the end of every week, a new minor version of the artefacts will be released. This will incorporate all hotfixes that have been made during the week. Since version 1.0.0 has been released there have already been two releases.

Process

We are pleased to see the Engineering artefacts being used, and thank the community for the contributions and providing feedback on the tools. If any issues are encountered, please raise them in Git.

Kind regards

Nick Hamilton