Capability area

Charging sessions

Start, stop and follow every charge from your own app.

Follow chargers and sessions live, without polling

One stream per project says the moment a charger connects, a session starts or ends, or new meter readings arrive.

Open one stream per project and Flowion tells you the moment something changes: a charger comes online or goes offline, a connector becomes occupied, a session starts, is updated or ends, new meter readings land, or a command you sent changes status. Your screen stays live without polling and without spending your rate limit on guesses.

An event names what changed, not the new value, so you refetch the session or the charger it points to. Several meter readings close together arrive as one event.

If the caller loses access to the project, the stream sends one last message and closes.

Good to know

  • Events are delivered on a best-effort basis and are a reminder, not a record: load the current state when you connect and after every reconnect.
  • The stream closes after 30 minutes and must be reopened. Access is checked again every two minutes.
  • It is not durable. For a server-to-server feed that survives your own downtime, use webhooks.
  • A browser's built-in EventSource cannot send the required header, so read the stream with fetch or through your own server.

Start and stop a charge remotely

Start a charge from your own app or on behalf of a named driver, cap it, and stop it, even when the charger is offline when you send.

Start a charge from your own app instead of an RFID card: one call to the charger, and the session begins as soon as a car is plugged in. You can start it for a named person, and the charger then decides it exactly as it would that person's own card: their permissions apply and the session is theirs. If they hold a reservation at that charger, the start claims it.

You can cap a session as it starts, by energy, time or state of charge, or limit the rate it may draw, and raise or set a cap on a session that is already running. You can stop a session whenever you like. Before you build a button, you can ask which commands a charger supports.

Every command is recorded with who sent it and how it ended. A charger that is offline does not make the call fail: the command waits and goes out when the charger reconnects, until it expires. Sending the same request with the same idempotency key again never starts a second session.

Good to know

  • Accepted by the charger does not mean charging: a car still has to be plugged in, and the new session is the sign that charging began.
  • After a timeout the charger may still have started the session, so check for a new session before sending another start.
  • A queued start expires after 15 minutes if the charger does not reconnect; a stop does too.
  • Caps on energy, time or state of charge, and some other commands, are not supported on every charger.

See every charging session, its energy and its cost

Every charge is recorded with its energy, why it stopped and, where a tariff applies, what it cost. List, total and export sessions.

Every charge is a session, recorded from the moment it starts: where it ran, which card started it, how much energy it delivered, why it stopped and what it cost. You can list a project's sessions and filter them by time, by running or ended, and by charger or card, total the energy and count over a period, and export the filtered set as one CSV file.

The energy of a session is worked out from the charger's meter readings and appears once the charger has sent two readings. Until then it is absent rather than shown as zero. When a tariff applies, Flowion prices a session, running or ended, and says plainly when no tariff applies or the energy is not yet known.

Each ended session carries the reason it stopped, so a normal end (the driver, the car, a limit) can be told from a fault or a charger restart.

Good to know

  • A session's cost is worked out fresh from the tariff that applies now, so editing or reassigning a tariff reprices earlier sessions. Keep your own copy if you need a fixed receipt.
  • A session has no energy figure until the charger has sent two meter readings, and none if it is not set up to send them.
  • A running session has no end time yet, so a report grouped by day has to allow for that.