Introduction
52ViKING is FiftyTwo’s retail platform. It runs the point of sale: the staffed till, the mobile POS a shop assistant carries, the self-checkout, the emergency POS that keeps a store trading when the network drops. It also holds the rules that decide what a customer pays.
The APIs documented here give an external system access to that same engine.
How the pieces fit
The platform splits into two halves, and knowing which half you are talking to explains most of the API design.
The store runs ViKING locally. Tills, the store server, and the peripherals are on-premise (or in a hybrid cloud) so that a shop keeps selling when its connection to the outside world does not. Discount evaluation, receipt printing, and till balancing all happen here.
52 Cloud sits in front of the estate. It takes master data in, distributes it to stores through the enterprise controller, and streams transaction data back out. This is what the APIs on this site talk to.
Because stores are authoritative for their own trading, most writes are
asynchronous. Master Data returns 202 Accepted with a location you poll;
Register Sale returns a correlation ID you poll. Design for that from the
start. See Errors and retries.
For the full architectural picture, see Understand ViKING architecture.
Which API do I need?
Vocabulary
52ViKING’s domain language is specific, and the API field names use it directly. A few terms that trip people up:
- An article is a sellable product. Articles belong to article groups (hierarchy) and discount families (promotion grouping).
- A discount group is a promotion rule. Its Buy side lists the articles that trigger the discount; its Get side lists the articles that receive it.
- An operator is a person who can sign into a till. A salesperson is who gets credited with the sale. They are often, but not always, the same human.
- A till is one POS. Bpar is the store configuration utility your FiftyTwo consultant manages.
The Glossary has the full list, and every term links to the help-center topic that explains it properly.