Portbase is working on the technical update of the of the Booking Subscription functionality. For terminals this means a change in the content of the Booking Subscription Reply message (M129). The technical specifications will remain unchanged. This release note describes the further details.
Technical specifications unchanged
We aim to update NED without any impact for the terminals. Therefore the technical specifications of the M129 message has not changed. You can find the current xsd here: https://support.portbase.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/xsd-version.pdf
However, the content of some fields might be different than you are used to.
Sequence numbers
The sequence number will always start at 1000 after the update of NED.
for existing booking subscriptions, this means that the updates can go from sequence number 1, to 2, to 1000.
for new booking subscriptions, the sequence number will always start at 1000.
Unlimited updates
Booking numbers with many updates will provide information without limitation.
You might receive updates again on booking number like “12345” or “UNKNOWN”, whereas they stopped getting updates after 999 times in the past.
Re-used booking numbers, like “DUMMY”, can get very long lists of equipment and documents, because they are updated without limit.
Only Uppercase
All data in the M129 message will be upper case from now on. In the past document numbers and agent codes could be lower case, if the input was also lower case. All input is now transformed to upper case before it is stored in our system. This makes the output to your terminal also upper case.
If you have any questions regarding this change, please contact customerservice@portbase.com