Hazardous Materials REST API

What the API does

Shipments. The DGAssistant JSON REST API creates the hazardous materials shipment from your own management or logistics system and returns the shipper's declaration, the checklist and the package marking, already verified against the regulation that applies. Your system keeps the commercial data; DGAssistant supplies the regulatory knowledge and the documents.

Consolidation. The API also covers the grouping of shipments from several shippers, along its two axes. The contractual axis is the master shipment — a booking, a sea or air consolidation, a road groupage — with its parties, its references, the shipments attached to it, its status transitions and its history. The physical axis is the transport equipment (container, vehicle, trailer or unit load device) and the transport movement (voyage, flight or journey) with its calls, together with the vessels, vehicles and locations of the account. More than half of the service is devoted to this part.

Open the Hazardous Materials API Specification

Two ways of working: batch and interactive

Batch. A single call carries the complete specification of the shipment with all of its goods. It is the way intended for management and logistics systems that send whole shipments already assembled.

Interactive. The shipment is opened first and the goods are added one by one. Every response carries the validation messages of what has just been added, so that your own application can show them to the user while the shipment is being prepared.

Predefined data or data on the fly

Predefined data. The products and the participants — consignors, carriers, consignees, loaders and drivers — are created beforehand and the API uses their codes. It is the simplest way to work and the one we recommend, because the regulatory classification is settled once and reused in every shipment.

Data on the fly. The products and the participants are defined in the same call that creates the shipment. It suits systems that do not keep a catalog of their own or that ship occasional goods.

The documents it returns

The API returns the same documents that the application produces. Those of the shipment and of the consolidation are retrieved in PDF, XLSX or DOCX, and those of the shipment can also be sent by electronic mail from the service itself; those of the consignment note, in PDF.

• For each shipment: the transport document of the applicable regulation —the ADR transport document, the IMO dangerous goods declaration or the IMDG multimodal form, and the IATA Shipper's Declaration—, the checklist, the package marking in full size or in small custom size and, by air, the air waybill data sheet.
• For the master shipment: the consolidation manifest, the container list, the packing list of each unit, the load sheet by consignor and the master document data sheet.
• For the transport unit: the container or vehicle packing certificate, the multimodal hazardous materials form, the segregation report of the unit, the checklist before the certificate is signed and the consolidation label.
• For the trip: the hazardous materials manifest, the segregation report between units on board, the ADR 1.1.3.6 exemption threshold report, the trip restriction sheet, the load sheet, the notification to the captain (NOTOC) and the consolidated transport document of the vehicle.
• For the consignment note: the draft, the signed copy, the attached ADR transport document and the evidence report.

What the API verifies

In the shipment. Segregation between the goods carried together, the quantity limits of the applicable packing instruction and of the limited and excepted quantity regimes, the admissibility of the goods for the mode of transportation, the legality of the packaging, and the completeness of the declaration. When something does not comply, the response states which rule is not met and with which values, so that the message can be shown in your own application.

In the consolidation. Segregation inside the transport unit, segregation between the units loaded in the same movement, the calculation of the 1.1.3.6 threshold of ADR for the movement with its breakdown, and the restrictions of the journey returned as data, such as the tunnel restriction code or the presence of high consequence hazardous materials.

Regulations and types of transportation covered

ADR for road, IMDG for sea, IATA for air and 49 CFR. The three main regulations are managed together and not as separate modules, so that a shipment that changes its mode of transportation does not have to be prepared again.

Mixed packing, overpacks, tanks, transportation in bulk, empty uncleaned packagings, waste, Class 1 explosives —with their net explosive mass per package— and Class 7 radioactive material are all supported, with the data that each of them requires. The texts of the documents are issued in nineteen languages.

Availability

The service is published in three regions — Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific — each with its own address, so that the integration works against the region where the account is held. The infrastructure is redundant and monitored around the clock.

How to start

Request a free two week trial, and with it the credentials of the service. Authentication uses OAuth 2.0 with the client credentials grant: your system obtains an access token and sends it in every request.

The complete specification is published in OpenAPI format and can be read, explored and used to generate a client in your own language before writing a single line of integration code.