Clari Offline Contract Development Loop
Overview
Make offline development the default and live provider calls an explicit integration stage. Model the provider’s authentication headers, job transitions, pagination, error objects, and schema drift without storing secrets or production records.
Prerequisites
- Chosen Clari surface and pinned contract version or fingerprint
- Synthetic fixtures covering success, empty, partial, and failure responses
- Local secret scanning and test-data classification rules
Instructions
Step 1: Define the contract boundary
List endpoints, headers, request fields, response fields, job states, and pagination semantics used by the integration.
Step 2: Build synthetic fixtures
Create minimal payloads that preserve shapes and identifiers while containing no real people, accounts, calls, forecasts, or deal values.
Step 3: Simulate state transitions
Make the test server move deterministically through queued, running, completed, aborted, rate-limited, and timed-out paths.
Step 4: Exercise adapters
Run parser, schema, retry, pagination, idempotency, and redaction tests against the simulator with network access disabled.
Step 5: Add one gated live smoke test
Use a dedicated non-production identity and the smallest read-only request; skip it unless credentials and explicit integration-test approval are present.
Step 6: Refresh deliberately
When the provider contract changes, review the diff, update fixtures and assertions together, and retain the old failing fixture as migration evidence.
Authentication
Offline tests must use obvious dummy values. A gated live test may read credentials from the approved secret manager at runtime, but must never serialize headers or provider payloads into test output.
Tool Discipline
Use Read and Grep to inspect configuration, provider contracts, fixtures, logs, schemas, and existing tests before proposing a change. Use Write or Edit only for the approved plan, implementation, test, or redacted receipt; do not issue, rotate, revoke, create, update, cancel, delete, export, ingest, or publish provider data without explicit operator approval.
Output
- Pinned endpoint and schema contract manifest
- Synthetic fixture set with provenance and data-classification receipt
- Offline test report plus separately identified live-smoke result
Return the exact surface, environment, resource or job identifiers, contract fingerprint, evidence, unresolved risks, and final decision without exposing credentials or sensitive customer data.
Examples
A local export client receives synthetic SCHEDULED, STARTED, and DONE responses, then a 429 and an ABORTED job. CI proves bounded retry and redaction without consuming a Clari export.
Error Handling
| Failure | Response |
|---|---|
| Fixture contains real customer data | Quarantine and remove it, rotate any exposed credential, and replace it with generated values. |
| Mock diverges from the provider contract | Pin the current contract fingerprint and add a regression fixture for the observed delta. |
| Live smoke runs unexpectedly | Fail closed unless an explicit environment gate and non-production credential are both present. |