Duplicate Connections
Learn what duplicate connections are and best practices for handling them.
What are duplicate connections?
Each connection in Terminal is a link to an underlying telematics provider account. When an end user goes through the Link Flow, it’s possible to create a duplicate connection if the provider account was already connected to Terminal.
Terminal will automatically detect duplicate connections and avoid creating a new connection. However, there are some cases where you may want to have multiple connections to the same provider account. More on this below.
How External IDs impact duplicate connections
External IDs are one of the ways to associate Custom Identifiers with a connection. External IDs are intended to be your system’s unique identifier for the connection.
If a different External ID is passed into the Link Flow than the one used to create the first connection, Terminal will create second connection to the same provider account. For this reason, we recommend using a consistent External ID from your system when initiating the Link Flow.
This can allow for intentionally creating a duplicate connection when you want to have multiple connections to the same provider account.