Confirming EBICS downloads

The EBICS protocol requires downloads to be confirmed with the confirm_download method. Otherwise some banks will block further downloads of the same order type for a specific time.

client = EbicsClient(...)
docs = client.C53()
client.confirm_download()

Before we go further you have to understand the difference between a download with and without a specified date range:

• Downloads without a given date range only contain new documents that have not been downloaded before. Think of it as a download queue from where you can remove documents with confirm_download(success=True). A confirmation with success=False keeps them in the queue.
• With a given date range you can also retrieve documents from the archive of already downloaded data. This way you are able to re-download files, even if already confirmed with success=True. Most banks also return new documents from the queue, but some banks only from the archive.

So you should confirm a download with success=True if the downloaded data was successfully processed by your application. Otherwise you should confirm with success=False:

client = EbicsClient(...)
try:
    camt53 = client.C53()
    camt54 = client.C54()
    process_documents(camt53, camt54)
except:
    client.confirm_download(success=False)
    raise
else:
    client.confirm_download(success=True)

To simplify things there is a context manager (since v4.4) which automatically confirms all downloads at the end of the with-block:

with EbicsClient(...) as client:
    camt53 = client.C53()
    camt54 = client.C54()
    process_documents(camt53, camt54)

It does pretty much the same as the previous example.