What are the fields that uniquely identify an account transaction?

[stevebissett]

Question 1:
Is there a reason why a unique identifier is not provided by the API to uniquely identify an account transaction? (even a unique identifier within a given account)?

Question 2
Given that an ID is not provided, which is the minimum set of fields that will always uniquely identify a transaction within an account so that a unique identifier can be built from this to help with an update or insert workflow.

Extra Context:

There are some very similar questions and discussions (unanswered), perhaps with the same intent:

Unique IDs are absent in several places throughout the API (account transactions, documents being two places).
I'm looking to understand which fields can be definitively used to uniquely identify a transaction.

There is an example in the Ruby client here, which assumes amount + description + date can uniquely identify a transaction.

I know that some terminals prevent the same amount on the same day, but I don't think that this is always the case, and my assumption is that it's possible to have the same transaction description + amount + date on the same day.

I assume that once these transactions are made, the postedOrder would indicate that they are indeed 2 different transactions.

    # At this point, there is no unique identifier being returned from Investec's API.
    # This method serves to create a stable unique identifier based on the transaction details.
    def id
      [
        amount.to_i,
        description,
        date.to_s
      ].map(&:to_s).join('-')
    end

I'm implementing a very common workflow:

• Retrieve transactions periodically to store full history to include older transactions than the API allows.
• Update transactions if they already exist and changes have been made to them.
• Create a new transaction if the transaction doesn't exist.
• Avoid duplicate transactions as an absolute requirement.

Related Discussions References

#10
https://github.com/orgs/Investec-Developer-Community/discussions/10

#9
https://github.com/orgs/Investec-Developer-Community/discussions/9

#6
https://github.com/orgs/Investec-Developer-Community/discussions/6

[nikspyratos]

I can say for Q 2, what I've been using is a combination of the account ID, date, description, currency, and amount. My use case was a bit simpler and I generally assume I won't be making the exact same transaction twice in the same day. If you add post order to that field list and to an upsert it should work.

[stevebissett]

I am currently doing this (using the postedOrder) - but I have a second ID that excludes it.
The main concern I have is that there are discussions around exposing pending transactions.

I am unsure if pending transactions are still regarded as POSTED.
I wouldn't want any fields that can change to be included in an identifier.

[programmable-banking-community]

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