phenix-passenger-service
Legacy ASMX/SOAP web service providing passenger-entry operations for Phenix (passengers, passports, emergency contacts, addresses, customers, portal-user checks) by aggregating many other estate services.
Health score
0 to 100 across seven weighted factors; nothing is hidden. Green is 75 and above, amber 50 to 74, red below 50. How scoring works.
Facts
| Languages | csharp |
| Frameworks | ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Ninject |
| Runtimes | .NET Framework 4.7.2 |
| Tests / CI | some / CI in place |
| Last commit | 2026-02-25 |
| Owner | Owner unknown (mapping to be curated) |
| Domain | Selling and quoting (system generated; curate in repo-owners.json to override) |
| Product area | Phenix |
| Hosted | On-prem Deployed to our own machines
|
| Releases | 2 release pipeline(s): \marketing\phenix-passenger-service; \marketing\phenix-passenger-service Stealth |
| Integration | soap, wcf, rest |
| Source | Open in Azure DevOps |
Risk flags
Each flag links to its glossary definition.
Dependencies in context
Entanglement
kernel Bound into the core by 2 mechanism(s).
- Pinning dependency: application-framework
- Speaks WCF (client)
Detaches when its pinning dependencies are cut or multi-targeted (application-framework); and when its WCF surface gains a modern interface or its WCF calls move to one.
Depends on / used by
Migration playbooks
Generated from this repo's assessment data: what is feasible, what blocks it, and the steps in order. Ratings: green means actionable now, amber means sequence other work first, red means blocked, grey means not applicable.
ZDD adoption
Needs workFeasible through the Workflow Engine's rolling drain, but real preparation is needed: dual-version discipline, better tests, or schema care before at-will release is sensible. Legacy runtime: the rolling drain works (stealth releases prove it) but relies on fix-forward risk rather than dual-version safety.
- Consumes WCF contract packages: never take a breaking client bump mid-feature, and treat obsolete warnings as migration debt
- Adopt the four-stage discipline from the ZDD engineering standard: pre-deployment compatibility, deployment, feature activation behind a flag, post-release cleanup.
- Raise automated test coverage first: ZDD trades the end-of-sprint manual gate for continuous automated confidence, so the tests are the entry ticket.
- Make every change dual-version safe: backwards-compatible APIs (new major version for breaking wire changes), expand and contract for any schema change, and consumers tolerant of unknown fields.
- Audit serialized data: anything in Redis, queues or shared caches must deserialize cleanly across adjacent versions.
- Wrap behaviour changes in feature flags so code deploys dark and release becomes a business decision, not a deployment event.
- Route deployments through the Workflow Engine's automated drain, deploy, health-check, return cycle (the path proven by the first automated production run in mid-2026).
- Verify with area-scoped regression rather than the whole-platform cycle, and watch error rates after rollout with automated rollback on alert.
SQL Server exit
Blocked by a shared databasesqlserver:DirectStockAccommodationContract is shared, so this system cannot change engine on its own: every sharer moves in convoy. Either agree the move with all sharers as one programme, or first split this system's data out behind an owned API, then follow the steps below.
- Inventory the schema and query surface of sqlserver:DirectStockAccommodationContract: tables, stored procedures, triggers, cross-database joins and anything else engine-specific.
- Confirm the target: PostgreSQL (relational model; keep transactions and joins, swap the engine).
- Replatform to modern .NET first (see the recommended actions): current PostgreSQL and MongoDB drivers and EF Core providers target modern .NET, and doing one risky change at a time is cheaper than doing two.
- Data access is not through an ORM, so port the SQL by hand: translate T-SQL constructs, replace stored procedures with application code or target-native equivalents, and add integration tests around the queries that matter first.
- Stand up the target alongside SQL Server, backfill with an ETL pass (pgloader or an export/import job), then dual-write or replicate until parity is proven.
- Move reads to the target, watch correctness and latency, then cut writes over and keep SQL Server read-only until confidence is earned.
- Decommission the SQL Server database and remove the connection strings and firewall paths that pointed at it.
Containerisation
Feasible after replatformingAppropriate, but the .NET Framework runtime has to go first; container work rides along with the replatform rather than preceding it.
- .NET Framework only runs on Windows; practical (Linux) containers need modern .NET
- Replatform to modern .NET first (see the recommended actions). Containerising then becomes routine.
- Add a Dockerfile and make the app read all configuration from environment variables and the secrets manager, never from machine-local files.
- Log to stdout and expose a health check endpoint so ECS can supervise it.
- Adopt the shared ci.yml pipeline template with the container parameters (awsRegion, containerAfterBuild, ecsTerraformRepo), which is exactly how the estate's existing AWS services deploy.
- Define the service in the Terraform repo, deploy to a non-production environment, then shift traffic and disarm the deployment-group release pipeline.
Recommended actions
Replatform phenix-passenger-service to modern .NET
Runs on .NET Framework 4.7.2, out of mainstream support. Blocked until stage 2 cuts: application-framework.
Impact: Reduces the end-of-life runtime count
proposedAssessment notes
phenix-passenger-service
Purpose
PassengerEntryService.asmx — a single SOAP web service with ~20 [WebMethod]s that back Phenix passenger entry: reading/writing passengers, passports, emergency contacts, telephones, emails and addresses, business-customer lookups, country data, credit checks and customer-portal-enabled checks. It is essentially an aggregation facade over half a dozen other estate services, with JSON DTO types serialised inside SOAP responses.
Tech stack
C# .NET Framework 4.7.2 classic web-application csproj (with modern PackageReference grafted in), ASMX web service base-classed on Ninject.Web.WebServiceBase, Polly, StackExchange.Redis and the full TC.Cache stack (configured to memory storage in Web.config), XDT config transforms for eight environments. README notes it is "best run with Visual Studio 2017+"; the solution dir setting still points into a PhenixRetail folder, betraying its origin.
Deployment
prod_application with 2 releases via build pipeline phenix-passenger-service (YAML, InternalOSS templates v1.0 using the Visual Studio build job with SDK 8.x tooling) and release pipelines \marketing\phenix-passenger-service and ... Stealth. IIS-hosted under the Phenix site.
Dependencies
Internal: tc-connectionbroker (Sql/Redis/Api/Wcf), tc-exceptions, application-framework (TC.Phenix.ApplicationFramework), phenix-contact-centre-wcf (ContactCentreSoap client), phenix-contact-centre-2-api (internal HTTP client), backoffice (Booking and Repository WCF service references via TC.Phenix.Services.Client), backoffice-address-lookup-service, backoffice-bt-credit-check (credit-check web API client), backoffice-useraccount-service. Also consumes TC.Phenix.Customer/Country/User and TC.CustomerPortalUsers.ServiceContracts packages.
Data stores
One direct SQL Server access: raw SqlConnection against the DirectStockAccommodationContract connection (direct-stock accommodation data). All other data is fetched via downstream services. Cache storage is in-process memory despite the Redis packages.
Integration points
Inbound SOAP (ASMX, BasicProfile 1.1, also [ScriptService] for JSON GET/POST). Outbound: SOAP to the contact-centre service, WCF to booking/repository/address-lookup/user-account services, REST to contact-centre-2 and credit-check APIs.
Code health
Effectively untested — the single test file is a CanCreateService smoke test. Actively changed (last commit 2026-02-25), so a legacy SOAP facade is still accreting behaviour. Mixed-era project file with .bak files checked in.
Modernisation risks
High priority: a production-critical, actively-developed ASMX service on .NET Framework 4.7.2 with fan-out to at least six other services and near-zero tests. ASMX has no migration path to modern .NET at all (worse than WCF/CoreWCF), so its operations need re-homing behind REST — likely alongside the passenger-configuration WCF pair, which covers the same domain.