General Guidelines for Hoopla Partner API Endpoint Use

The Hoopla Partner API Development Team has some general guidelines for partners to follow when calling our API endpoints. This will ensure everyone is maintaining an efficient process and appropriately accessing our API.

Request Debouncing

Add a debounce mechanism to delay API endpoint calls by 300-500ms after user input stops, or when the user presses enter.

Rate Limiting

Ensure the client does not exceed certain 100 requests per minute.

Use exponential backoff on 429 errors.

Batch Processing

Use bulk endpoints where available and limit batch sizes to 500 items.

Implement pagination for large datasets.

Caching

Cache search results, metadata, and static content with appropriate TTL values.

Implement cache invalidation policies to keep data fresh.

Error Handling

Log all errors, retry on 429 responses, and display helpful messages to end users (patrons).

Request Optimization

Use query parameters to narrow down data retrieval.

Implement conditional requests with If-Modified-Since headers.

Combine similar requests to reduce server calls.

Performance Tuning

Adjust the batch size between 200–500* per request.

Decrease Hoopla holdings refresh to every other day*.

*actuals will be dependent on how your system behaves in production

Testing

We have migrated to OpenAPI and are asking our partners to do the same. Here is the new URL: https://api-docs.hoopladigital.com/partner/index.html#/

With this move comes a change to our testing process as well. The Hoopla Team are reserving our Dev Environment for internal testing and have moved our partner testing to our Staging Environment.

For staging credentials, please email hdiscovery@midwesttape.com.