Best Practices

This guide describes the recommended practices for integrating with the Trudenty Consumer Trust Index (CTI) API. Following these recommendations helps improve security, reliability, and application performance.

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Secure Your Credentials

Your Client ID and Client Secret uniquely identify your application.

Trudenty recommends that you:

• Store x-client-id and x-client-secret credentials in a secure secrets management solution.
• Never expose credentials in source code or client-side applications.
• Rotate credentials immediately if they are suspected to be compromised.

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Always Use HTTPS

All API requests must be sent over HTTPS.

HTTPS encrypts data exchanged between your application and the Trudenty platform, helping protect sensitive consumer information.

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Handle Errors Gracefully

Applications should expect and appropriately handle API errors.

Recommended practices include:

• Validate request data before sending requests.
• Handle authentication failures separately from server errors.
• Retry only transient failures such as HTTP 429 and 500.

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Respect Rate Limits

Current rate limit:

500 requests per minute per client IP

Monitor your request volume and implement exponential backoff when retrying rate-limited requests.

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Log Request Identifiers

Every response includes an X-Request-ID.

Store this identifier in your application logs.

Providing the request identifier when contacting Trudenty Support significantly reduces investigation time.

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Data handling

• Treat consumer_id as a sensitive consumer identifier. Apply your organization's data protection policies.
• Handle 404 / no_network_record gracefully — it indicates no trust index exists for that consumer, not an API failure.

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Performance

• Cache responses according to your business rules if repeat lookups for the same consumer occur within a short window.
• Use pagination (page, limit) on history requests rather than requesting large page sizes unnecessarily.

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