Vehicle lubricant recommendation REST API for a major oil brand

The challenge

A major Indian oil and lubricants brand publishes guidance on the right lubricants for each vehicle. It wanted that guidance available as a REST web service that other systems could call to retrieve the full set of recommendations.

The work came to us through an Indian digital agency that looked after the brand's lubricants website. The service had to map each vehicle type, make and model to the right products across several categories, and return the data in a precise format agreed with the brand's own technical team.

What we did

• Recommendation REST API. We built a JSON REST service that returns the complete recommendation set in a single call, with no input parameters needed. For each vehicle type, make and model it lists the recommended engine oil, gear oil, differential oil, brake fluid, coolant and steering fluid.
• Product data mapping. Each recommendation links to the matching product and its specification sheet PDF.
• Format alignment. The brand's technical team reviewed the output and asked for structural changes. Between March and July 2017 we reworked the response format to match its requirements exactly.
• Website update. Alongside the API, we updated the header of the brand's lubricants website, adding a new event banner through the site's header view files.

The service was developed in PHP on the CodeIgniter framework and tested on a staging server before the link was shared with the agency.

Tech stack

PHP, CodeIgniter, REST/JSON