Benefits Intake API - Claims going expired every time

[gwenna97]

VA Lighthouse API Bug Report

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Benefits Intake API V1
MicroPact
Production
Claims going expired every time
Multiple clients

Severity of the issue

• Medium severity: Not blocking work, but needs attention

• I was able to use the API, but am not getting the results I expected

  <!-- The only workaround is to file the claim manually and not use API -->
  

1. Submitting some claims electronically

Actual Outcome:

Goes pending then expired every time

Only happening for a some claims

Expected Outcome:

Claim is under 100 MB per document limit
Claim is under 5 GB per submission limit
Should be going electronically without expiration

[ryanlink]

Hi Gwenna -

The expired status means that no submission was uploaded (PUT) within 15 minutes to the location created in the initial POST request.

This can happen for several reasons including dropped connections. Your logs may be able to tell you what happened with the upload, and we recommend logic in your code to retry an upload to the same GUID within the 15-minute window if you get anything other than a 200 OK response.

If this is happening consistently, the VA firewall may be terminating connections due to false-positive threat detection in the binary encoding of your PDFs. This was happening with at least one other consumer of the API. If that is the case, we recommend using base64 encoding instead, which is detailed in https://developer.va.gov/explore/benefits/docs/benefits.

Please note when using base64 that the whole payload needs to be encoded, not the individual attachments.

If you or Scott have any further questions, please send an email to [email protected] and we'll get you back on track. Thanks!

Ryan Link
VA Lighthouse Support
developer.va.gov