TED (EU Public Tenders)

This connector searches TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the online version of the Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU, through its public Search API v3 at https://api.ted.europa.eu. TED publishes public procurement above the EU thresholds from all EU member states, the EEA and other participating countries: some 3,500 to 4,000 notices every working day, calls for tenders as well as contract awards.

Setup: none. The search API is public and needs no account or API key; install the connector and use it. (A TED developer API key only matters for submitting notices, which this connector does not do.)

Tools

• ted_search_notices: expert-query search with chosen fields, pages and scope.
• ted_get_notice: the full detail of one notice by publication number.
• ted_count_notices: how many notices match a query, without fetching them.
• ted_check_query: checks a query's syntax and field names without running it.

Expert query syntax (the same language as the Expert Search page on ted.europa.eu):

• Compare fields with =, !=, IN (a b c), ~ (contains words, e.g. title-proc~"cloud hosting") and >, >=, <, <=.
• Combine with AND, OR, AND NOT and parentheses. A bare NOT after a condition is a syntax error; write AND NOT.
• FT~(word) or FT~"a phrase" searches the full text of the notice.
• Sort with SORT BY publication-date DESC at the end.
• Dates are YYYYMMDD (publication-date>=20260101) or relative: today(), today(-7).
• Countries are ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes: DEU, AUT, CHE, FRA, ITA, ESP, NLD, BEL, POL, SWE.
• CPV codes match everything below them: classification-cpv IN (72000000) (IT services) also finds 72260000. Common divisions: 03 agriculture, 09 energy, 15 food, 30 office and computing equipment, 33 medical, 34 transport equipment, 45 construction work, 48 software, 50 repair and maintenance, 71 architecture and engineering, 72 IT services, 79 business services, 80 education, 85 health and social, 90 waste and environment.
• Notice types (notice-type): pin-only and the other pin-* (prior information), cn-standard and cn-social (calls for competition), can-standard and can-social (contract awards), veat (voluntary ex-ante transparency), corr (corrections).

Useful patterns:

• Open calls in a sector and country: classification-cpv IN (72000000 48000000) AND buyer-country=DEU AND deadline-receipt-tender-date-lot>=today() SORT BY publication-date DESC, with scope ACTIVE.
• Who wins what: notice-type=can-standard AND winner-name~"company name" SORT BY publication-date DESC.
• Today's edition: scope LATEST.

Fields: every result carries only the fields asked for. The default is a compact summary (publication number and date, notice type, procedure title, buyer, country, CPV, contract nature, procedure type, tender deadline, estimated value, awarded value and winner). Text fields are objects keyed by language ({"deu": "..."}) in the languages the buyer used; notice-title comes in all 24 EU languages and is large, so prefer title-proc. A field that does not apply to a notice is simply missing. Each notice carries links to its English HTML page, English PDF and multilingual XML; replace /en/ in the HTML link for another language.

Paging and limits: limit is 1 to 250 notices per page, and limit times the number of fields may not exceed 10,000. Page numbers reach the first 15,000 notices of a query; to walk through more, use paginationMode ITERATION and pass each response's iterationNextToken back until no notices return. Keep limit around 10 to 20 for reading in a chat.

Errors: a 400 names the problem: QUERY_SYNTAX_ERROR (with line and column), QUERY_UNKNOWN_FIELD (a field name in the query or in fields TED does not know), QUERY_UNSUPPORTED_FIELD_VALUE (a malformed value, e.g. a publication number without the year), SEARCH_EXCEEDS_MAX_LIMIT. Run ted_check_query when a query keeps failing.

Reuse and bidding: TED is run by the Publications Office of the EU; its terms of use are in the legal notice at https://ted.europa.eu/en/legal-notice. Notices are legal texts: for a bid, always read the procurement documents linked in document-url-lot and submit through the buyer's platform in submission-url-lot.