Portal distribution, and what "not reached" means

Portal distribution turns a listing into the file format the major sites read, and prepares it against the property, not against a form field somebody has to re-answer for the portal's benefit.

The type is derived, not typed twice

A listing carries a property class (residential, commercial, rural, land, business, or holiday rental) and a method (private treaty, auction, expressions of interest, or tender). The REAXML type sent to a portal is worked out from those: a lease against a residential property is a rental, a lease against a holiday-rental property stays a holiday rental, and a business sale rides the commercial type whichever way it was entered. You are not asked to answer the same question about your own listing twice in two different vocabularies.

Three states, not two, for a suppressed field

A field can be present, suppressed, or not reached, and those are three different facts. Present means it went out. Suppressed means the price display gate ran and deliberately held the field back - an auction listing in a jurisdiction whose rule suppresses the price is publishable precisely because the price is absent, and the screen names the rule that suppressed it beside the field. Not reached means the gate refused before it got that far, which is a different problem with a different fix. An agent who cannot tell "suppressed on purpose" from "something is broken" is the agent who rings support to ask why a price fell off a portal that was never supposed to carry it.

Identity is never regenerated

The reference a portal knows a listing by, and the agency identifier attached to it, both come in from your own records and go out unchanged. A listing carrying neither is refused rather than given a freshly minted one, because deleting and recreating a listing's identity on a portal is against that portal's own acceptable use policy, and inventing an identity here would be that breach arriving through a different door.

Nothing here reaches a real site yet

Every feed target runs in one of three lanes: prepare only, a stand-in response, or a test address - never a live one. That is stated once, at the top of the feeds screen, rather than repeated on every row, because a fact this important belongs where a person reads it first rather than being said four times in four places until it starts to sound like an apology. The confirmation after every attempt, and the chip on every prepared file, both say the same thing again in case you arrived at the row before you read the top of the page.