FAQ

Yes. From the subscriptions page, clicking on the 'Actions' menu on the right-hand side, next to your 'Legacy' subscription, opens a menu. From here, click 'Test Migration' and that will allow you to select a Free plan that will exist in parallel to your original subscription, without affecting your existing integration. You can then test your new integration using the credentials provided. This free test subscription will be automatically removed when migrating your original subscription, and new credentials will be issued.

Any requests made using the parallel plan will come out of the data allowance for your IBM plan, so we recommend keeping these to a minimum. If there are any quota issues as a result of your testing, please get in touch.

There will be no need to make any changes to orders - these will continue as normal, and there are no changes to the underlying data.

Yes. Once you begin to migrate your existing subscription, a new API key will be generated and your test plan cannot run in parallel.

With our new API you will only need to pass in 'apikey' as a header, this will replace our previous authentication headers 'x-ibm-client-id' & 'x-ibm-client-secret'

Yes. Once you begin to migrate your existing data plan a new API key will be generated and your test plan cannot run in parallel.

It is essential for migration to be completed by Tuesday 30 April 2024 to avoid loss of service.

We have tried to keep the changes you will need to make to a minimum. The following things will need to be taken into consideration:

1. The first part of the URLs you will need to call has changed.
2. The authentication headers have changed. Instead of the client ID and client secret headers that had to be provided previously, there is now a single ‘apikey’ header that should be provided for each request.
3. For users with relevant subscriptions, when providing the file ID to download data, this will now need to be URL encoded instead of using the literal value returned by the API. This particularly applies to file IDs with a '+'. Failing to do this will result now result in a 404 response.

Further details on these changes can be found in our API documentation.

The first part of the URLs that you call to retrieve your data will be different following the migration of your plan (please see our documentation). If you are trying to access the spot API you will also have to remove /forecast/ from your URL, so '/forecasts/point/hourly' is now just '/point/hourly'. The only other thing to note is that the file name must now be URL encoded when downloading data for Atmospheric orders.

No. All of the data downloaded following the migration will be identical. The only changes you will need to allow for are the different base URLs, and the single API key in place of the previous credentials.

The main changes you will need to make will be to the base URL and to the request headers. There will be no need to make any changes to orders - these will continue as normal, and there are no changes to the underlying data.

Once you have migrated, there is no option to revert to your original service, as the last step is to cancel your IBM subscriptions.

In order to upgrade or downgrade your subscription that is labelled as 'Legacy', you will first need to migrate it. After this, you will see a 'Change Plan' option under the 'Actions' menu for the subscription. This will allow you to select the plan you would like to move to.

If you have any questions, concerns, or require assistance, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our support team at dpt@metoffice.gov.uk.