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Question

Best practice: External postcode API integration in Universal edit screen

  • January 2, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 107 views

Hello Thinkwise Community,

I’m working in Universal (version 2025.3) and I want to automatically fill street and city fields based on a postal code and house number using the Company.info API, so that the address information is always up-to-date.

The main challenge is that I cannot call the API while inserting/editing a row in the default screen. Additionally, I want to ensure data integrity: if the API fails or does not return a valid address, the original values in the record should remain unchanged. I’ve seen solutions using an auto-commit approach, but that can leave fields empty if the API doesn’t find a match, which I want to avoid.

Requirements / constraints:

  • Universal environment (2025.3)

  • Call an external postcode/address API to populate street and city

  • Triggered when editing a record

  • On API failure or missing data, revert the record to its original state

Has anyone implemented a similar solution in Universal? Are there best practices for safely calling an external API from a row-edit screen while maintaining the original record if the API call fails?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

4 replies

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This is such a good idea collin


Renée Evertzen
Moderator
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Hey ​@Collin Wu 

I would love to help you out but unfortunately I don’t have a lot of experience with this. Perhaps someone who works at Professional Services is better equipped to answer this question, or a fellow developer from outside Thinkwise. 

Kind regards, 

Renée 


Arie V
Community Manager
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  • Community Manager
  • January 7, 2026

@Collin Wu Auto-commit in combination with smart handling of the response is indeed the best way to support this scenario. 


Arie V
Community Manager
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  • Community Manager
  • January 8, 2026

@Collin Wu Update: did discuss this topic internally and we agree that ideally it should be possible to call an API/System Flow without the need to commit something to the Database. Now that we’re moving to a 3-tier only architecture for the entire platform from Release 2026.1 onwards, we see possibilities to make this work.

Have added it to our Roadmap and I’m pretty confident that we’ll launch this feature in 2026.