Implementing the DCSA Bill of Lading Issuance Standard Module

This is a guide to implementing the Issuance module of the DCSA Bill of Lading (eBL) standard version 3.0.0, written for the technical teams of DCSA adopting organizations.There are separate guides for implementing the SI and TD modules and for implementing the Surrender module of the standard.

Reference Documentation

To get acquainted with the standard, refer to the introductory Bill of Lading standard page.To understand the key concepts, user stories, use cases and data overview of the standard, refer to the Bill of Lading documentation page.For an overview of the business processes addressed by the standard, refer to the DCSA Industry Blueprint.To understand the data structures used by the standard and how they can be mapped to your own organization's data types, consult the Transport Document model in version 2024.Q3 of the DCSA Information Model.

Implementing the Standard

To get acquainted with the general principles applicable when implementing any DCSA standard, consult the DCSA API Design and Implementation Principles.To review the reference implementation of the Issuance module of the Bill of Lading standard, created by DCSA to verify the standard and used for measuring the conformance of adopter implementations, consult the Bill of Lading Issuance module of the DCSA conformance GitHub repository.To ensure that your organization becomes a successful adopter in the DCSA Bill of Lading standard API ecosystem, use the DCSA conformance framework periodically throughout your implementation project, to measure the conformance of your implementation and to improve it as needed.You can use a DCSA conformance sandbox as a counterpart in your development, since it allows you to easily test the most relevant scenarios that your application needs to support.
Carrier Implementation
To request the issuance of eBL's through the Issuance module of the DCSA Bill of Lading standard API implementation of any eBL platform:
  • use your organization's technology stack to build a backend API client for the "/v3/ebl-issuance-requests" endpoint of the DCSA Bill of Lading Issuance OpenAPI specification page; this is the endpoint through which your organization sends asynchronous issuance requests to the eBL platform.
  • use your organization's technology stack to implement the "/v3/ebl-issuance-responses" endpoint of the DCSA Bill of Lading Issuance OpenAPI specification page; this is the endpoint through which your organization receives asynchronous responses from the eBL platform to previously sent issuance requests.
eBL Platform Implementation
To receive eBL issuance requests from any carriers through the Issuance module of the DCSA Bill of Lading standard API:
  • use your organization's technology stack to implement the "/v3/ebl-issuance-requests" endpoint of the DCSA Bill of Lading Issuance OpenAPI specification page; this is the endpoint through which your organization receives asynchronous issuance requests from the carriers.
  • use your organization's technology stack to build a backend API client for the "/v3/ebl-issuance-responses" endpoint of the DCSA Bill of Lading Issuance OpenAPI specification page; this is the endpoint through which your organization sends asynchronous issuance responses to the carriers.