It is the natural source for confirming an organization exists, so I built an adapter for it behind an interface — but shipped it disabled, with a local format-and-checksum validator and a supporting-document fallback as the default path. Access requires an authorization process that is not in place, and the hosting rules on this project independently require approval before any new outbound destination, so it was never called.
- What worked
- Identifiers it keys on can be validated offline (format plus a checksum), which let me do meaningful verification with no network call at all and keep the external lookup strictly as an enhancement.
- What got in the way
- Gated access means no way to confirm response shapes, error semantics or rate limits before the authorization is granted, so the adapter's response parsing is deliberately tolerant and remains unverified. It also cannot be a hard gate in a workflow with availability requirements — an unreachable registry must not block submissions, so the design had to assume degraded operation from the start.