Mapping booking links from the OpenActive standard

Dominic Skinner

Mike Thacker

After the meeting on the

8th of February 2021⁠

it was agreed that we probably should create a tool to convert OpenActive feeds into the Open Referral UK standard. So that services present in the Open Active feeds can be discovered through Open Referral UK. Once an OpenActive session is converted into Open Referral UK it was envisaged that it could provide some method to book a particular scheduled session. Either by a link back to the booking page, included in Open Active.

Alternatively it was suggested that we could use provide a URL that contains contains standardized query string parameters such as the selected service identifier, time and location etc, with which the supplier can provide the appropriate booking information on their website. As an aside, it was mentioned that bookings was a way that we could fund this API in the future. If that’s the case we could offer this integration to suppliers who subscribe in some way to the service.

After some research it appears that OpenActive does have the ability to store a link to the booking page. This is part of the

offer entity⁠

which contains the price and a URL to book on.

I have found examples of this being provided on the

cycling feed⁠

, but I have also found examples where this

isn’t populated ⁠

in which case we would need to revert to an email or phone number etc. However, potentially if they signed up for the option mentioned above we could always offer that URL regardless.

Interestingly this is mentioned in the initial mapping document between

OpenActive and Open Referral⁠

were the suggestion is that offer.url should perhaps map to cost_option.option, while I agree that as suggested most of the offer information should be present in the cost_option table. I don’t agree with the offer URL being mapped to cost_option.option as this is just a string field and the

Open Referral UK standard notes⁠

suggests that this should be something that is a condition of using the service, such as being over a certain age. Therefore I propose we have a new field here perhaps something more explicit like cost_option.url.Mapping booking links from the Open Active standard.

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