Stream of additions and updates from the facility registry

[steesdale]

Stream of additions and updates from the facility registry

Why it matters: REST integration patterns include exposing an activity stream from a registry system so that other services and HIMs can conceptually subscribe and trigger business processes based on changes in data. ResourceMap supports this as a RSS feed, and Thoughtworks indicated they were working on something similar in other apps may be worthwhile consolidating the conventions about how to expose actors,verbs and other data in the stream as this may facilitate integrating with e.g. Motech or other suites.

Interested parties: Thoughtworks, Columbia, Intrahealth

[edjez]

See current implementation here as a reference:

https://bitbucket.org/instedd/resource_map/wiki/Changes%20Feed

Would be good to agree on

• RSS or Atom? (RSS made more sense for our first implementation as it imposed less 'article feed' semantics)
• Format of human-readable activity
• What are the entities we want to track ('sites' would be within the FRED scope API for starters)
• What are the verbs
• Make sure we have href links to the affected entities (unless it's a deletion)

[ctford]

In Uganda, we already use the FRED registry as a stream of updates. We simply specify a lastModified filter so that we only get the most recently changed facilities. We did this because we maintain a mirror of facilities in a client app to the registry so that we dan do local queries.

That's not to say that a first-class event feed wouldn't be very useful.