I just completed the CA evaluation for Metrc. While I had hoped the third time would be a charm, and things would go smoothly, it was not to be. I probably spent a total of 4 hours getting through this . . . ouch! I’ll share some of the challenges I ran into, if for no other reason, so that I can learn from it.
To find usable tags, you need to parse several files. However, it’s not obvious what licensee type is represented by each file. This has tripped me up before. The solution here is to use facilities/v1/ to list all license numbers and types.
I initially thought there was nothing populated in the db. After all, last year the sandbox was reset, and there wasn’t enough data to be able to do anything. Without any starting inventory, the API can be really hard to use.
But the problem this time is "API Program Bulletin 17". Since you only get back items which have changed in the past 24 hours by default, initially finding inventory via curl calls makes the system seem empty. I suppose that makes it less likely you’ll stomp on someone else’s data.
Trying to do anything with rooms/v1/ resulted in a “401 Unauthorized” error regardless of which
licensee I tried. I ended up emailing metrc to find “they have been working on some problems” related to rooms. Fortunately, I was given a license number that worked. However, this would bite me later!
I temporarily stumbled over “changegrowthphase” vs “changegrowthphases”. This is not the first time I’ve been bit by this, and it's not a big deal. But still, it was a head scratcher until I realized what was wrong.
The next hurdle was discovering one of the Grower accounts had only 4 plant tags left. Of course, I had used this account to set up strains and items. But without tags, I wasn’t going to get much done. This is where the bulk of my time was spent: first in haphazardly guessing which tags were available, and ultimately in some code to automate finding free tags.
Once I could better analyze tag usage, I switched to another grower license which had many tags available. However, I would soon discover this new licensee was affected by the Rooms issue I ran into earlier. So now I had tags, but no rooms. I tried guessing some room names so I could move product around, but ended up having to ask metrc for a list of room names I could use.
I made a mistake (again) in not reading what should be included in each response. I recorded tags and/or ids as I went, but before I could submit, I had to revisit most of the sections to get other information. For example, some sections require name, date or licensee number. It wasn’t difficult to backfill the data, but would have been more efficient had I captured it right off the bat.
At the end of the evaluation, I had a shiny new tool that lets me check a list of Plant or Package tags and see which are already used. While I’ve built this before (at least for Packages), that was before Bulletin 17, when it was possible to get “allPackages” at once. So I’ve rewritten the tool to work with both types of tags, and to check each individually. This should make life easier during the next evaluation . . . which will likely be for Michigan.
