Build a pricing integration

Request price data using an exact market hash name and currency. Store the returned formatted values, currency, retrieval time, and availability state together.

Use controlled concurrency and an application-specific cache window. A missing listing and a transient upstream failure require different product behaviour.

Prerequisites

• a server-side application key;
• an application ID, exact market hash name, and supported currency from the Market operation;
• a cache policy expressed in time, not in request count;
• a display model that can represent missing and stale observations.

Retrieval flow

1. Normalize only inputs your application owns; preserve the exact market hash name used for the request.
2. Send the request with an explicit deadline.
3. Store the returned price strings and volume alongside the requested currency and retrieval time.
4. Record the request ID and outcome without storing request headers.
5. Serve or refresh the observation according to your declared freshness policy.

The public response exposes formatted price fields. Do not remove punctuation and perform financial arithmetic unless your application has a reviewed, currency-aware parsing contract. A market observation is not a guaranteed executable trade price.

Error handling

Correct invalid input or authentication before retrying. Coordinate rate-limit handling across workers, and retry transient upstream outcomes only with a bounded backoff policy. Preserve a missing observation separately from a failed refresh.

Production considerations

Apply cache coalescing for repeated item/currency reads, cap concurrency, and monitor status, duration, cache result, and observation age. Never log the API key. Continue with Currency handling, Caching, and Community Market errors.