Data-Exchange Portal

The challenge

At the core was a mapping problem: incoming data arrived in each external system's format and had to be translated into ours before our API would accept it. What made that hard wasn't volume. It was that the data couldn't be trusted to be clean or consistent, and there was little time to build for it.

Some disagreements were subtle enough to slip past a naive translation. A recurring one was date-range semantics: one system treated a range's end date as exclusive ("up to"), the other as inclusive ("up to and including"). Map it across without accounting for that and every affected record lands off by a day, an error that never throws. It just silently produces a wrong case file. Field-level rules diverged the same way: a field mandatory on our side could be optional or nullable on theirs, and the reverse.

On top of that, some incoming data was simply incorrect or corrupt, occasionally describing a state that could not legally exist in our own system. So the layer could not just translate faithfully. It had to recognise impossible input and refuse it rather than force it through.

And it all happened against a moving target. New mapping edge cases kept surfacing while partners were already live in production, which meant fixing the mapping and repairing the data it had already written, directly on the production server, under real customers.

What I built

• The mapping layer that transformed each partner's incoming data into the canonical format our API accepted, designed and taken live in roughly a week under a hard deadline.
• A validation and error-handling layer inside that mapping, reconciling conflicting rules between the two systems (inclusive versus exclusive date ranges, mismatched required and nullable fields) and rejecting corrupt or impossible input instead of letting it corrupt a case file.
• Integration management on top of the pipeline: tooling to configure and oversee the partner integrations and their data exchange as their number grew.
• Full-stack work across this feature and the wider platform, from the Laravel/PHP backend through the jQuery and Bootstrap frontend.